Discombobulation

We spent the day yesterday, my brother and I, doing some plumbing on the water system of his home. He lives in an area where water wells are needed, and has a well, pump, tank, etc. His water system was not the best, with low pressure and flow rates pretty much everywhere in the house. So we took a shot at the plumbing coming into the house that hooks up to the tanks, thinking that might be the place that was causing the trouble.
He had a double tank system. There was a larger tank and a smaller one hooked in parallel. The pipes were large size, but older. When we took them apart, we readily found the source of the problem. Those large pipes were corroded so badly that there was no more than a pencil-width of clear space through them for water to pass. One of the tanks was apparently completely blocked and the plumbing had been installed with far too many elbows and turns.
The problem with the corrosion was far greater than we had expected, so he was disheartened that he may well have to replace the plumbing in the entire house. But we continued with just the part that we were working on in the hopes that it would at least make the water system tolerable.
Of course, a two hour job turned into all day. One trip to the hardware store turned into three trips to that store and one trip to each of two others. And when we finally finished late in the evening, we did have a drip or two.
However, we also have better water service to the rest of the house, and we know that the water well will produce 18 gallons of water a minute, something we didn’t know before because we didn’t have any way to test it before. Even with the drip or two that is in the new system, and the prospect of having to replace even more pipes, what we did was clearly an improvement.
How many times do we look at a problem and, instead of tackling it head on, push it to the background, hoping it will just go away? How often do we ignore something and just put up with it because we don’t want to have the temporary disruption that the cure would cause? I think that’s true not only with things like plumbing, but also with things in life…bad habits, dysfunctional relationships, crummy jobs, and others. Yes, the cure may cause some discombobulation, but the outcome is so much more pleasant, it’s really worth the trouble.