A lesson from the checkout line...

Everyone has their own style of unloading the grocery cart.  I'm pretty haphazzard with the exception of watching that the tomatoes don't get crushed.  John groups like with like--which means he typically waves me away giving me time to read supermarket tabloids without actually buying them.

Last week, when we were at the grocery store, John motioned for me to watch the man unloading in front of us. He was a normal looking sort of person.  Tall, slender...dressed like he worked in an office.  As he unloaded, he took extraordinary care with the positioning of the items.  Often setting and resetting until labels were aligned and there was no wasted space between items.

It didn't take long for us to realize he had OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and while I watched a process that was probably more painful for him than it was for me, it occured to me that we all have OCD.

It may not manifest in exactly the same way as his, but there is something in all of us that is just a little bit crazy.  (In fact, I'm curious if a person's 'cool factor' is defined by just how well they hide said crazy.)

The better we know people, the more we know their crazy. (And we REALLY know our spouse's crazy.) If we are self-aware, we know our own. The completely irrational things we do over and over simply because we do them. Our little ways of controlling our world so that we don't feel so defenseless.

The thing is that we can be heavily invested in things that really don't matter (like having all of the labels line up); and in doing so, I wonder how often we miss the things that do.