Melissa's Place

Getting to the Same End

I procrastinated in sending out a thank you card to my good friend Mel. I procrastinated so long that I found myself looking at it sitting on the table by the door as I set out to meet Mel for a lunch date. “I could just GIVE her the card now, instead of mailing it,” I told myself. (A perfectly logical solution). The problem was, I had already affixed a stamp to the card’s envelope. It was a sticker-type stamp that wouldn’t easily come off. Then would come the issue of whether it could be re-used and re-stuck to the next envelope. Would I have just wasted fifty two cents? And it’s not even about the money, so much as the idea of wasting something that hadn’t been allowed to fulfill its destiny – its functional right!

I remember being faced with a parallel situation almost ten years ago. Hilary and I had gone on a road trip to Hamilton and Kingston and Ottawa and then back. We had perhaps not been very confident drivers at the time, for we’d planned the entire trip around the Greyhound bus schedule. We bought return tickets, obviously, because we planned on ….well….returning. But then, while we were in Ottawa, my friend Mélanie, offered us a free ride to Kingston. I immediately wanted to decline, since we’d already purchased our tickets to Kingston via Greyhound. However, Hilary felt my logic was flawed. If Mélanie wanted to spend more time with us and we wanted to spend more time with her, what were we losing? I argued that we were losing out on the bus tickets we had already paid for. BUT, said Hilary, we will still be GETTING to our destination AND we will have the additional bonus of spending time with Mélanie. The bus ticket money is already spent, the only thing undetermined is how we will get to Kingston. Who cares how we get there, right? It was a refreshing and new idea to me. This abandonment of an imagined obligation to use a ticket or a stamp that has already been paid for if the same end can be attained in some other way. Really, has anything been lost?

I remembered this discussion Hilary and I had over a decade ago as I left the card on the table by the door. I went and had lunch with Mel, returned home, waited another three or four days and then finally got around to mailing the thank you card.