This weekend, my family welcomed a new addition. Not a baby, or a pet… something shinier and, at least in the suburbs, worthy of much more speculation from the neighbors. We got a new stove. Or a range, or an oven. Whatever you want to call it… it has a top where you boil things and a box where you bake things.
It’s shiny. It gleamed in the sun as we drove it home in the back of a buddy’s pickup truck. It’s fancy, too. One of the eyes on the top can take extra power and boil water faster. Another one can change size depending on how big a pot you’re using. The oven has convection, meaning there’s a fan in the back that’ll move the heat around, and there’s a divider you can use to split the one oven into two. All ovens have lights, but this one turns it on automatically when you open the door! And then there’s the warming drawer with three separate warming settings. They will go unused because—like every other stove in a built-too-small house in Bucks County—the drawer will be used for cookie sheet & muffin tin storage.
My wife spent 30 minutes reading through the entire manual. She can tell you every option the thing has and how they work. I picked the manual up, got to the warning on page two that read “DO NOT PHYSICALLY ENTER THE OVEN UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES”, and put the manual back down.
But here’s the kicker. This thing does everything so much BETTER than our old stove did. Preheating to 350 took 10 minutes or more on our old stove. This one’s preheated in less than five. Bringing water to a boil, even when we don’t use the special eye, is blazingly fast. On the old one, it took forever. Even when we weren’t watching the pot. We were content with the old stove, but the new one is improved at every facet. We didn’t know what we were missing!
That’s why complacency is so dangerous. The world keeps moving. If you stop, if you get comfortable and quit paying attention, you can get passed by and miss out on newer, potentially better things. Whether you miss out on a new stove feature or not isn’t the end of the world, but if you’re complacent with your physical lifestyle, your health, your finances… what if you miss out on something better there?
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