We live in Central Kansas, and we’re known for our exuberant weather. Sometimes I think our weather has an inferiority complex and thinks it’s competing with weather from all over the nation in a contest of who’s best. We normally have wind, so we don’t even start to call it windy until we’ve got 40 mph constant wind, sprinkled with gusts of 10 or 20 mph over that. We’ll get rain by the bucketloads, so much that the rain gauges can’t hold it all. On those days, the news people report “We had a minimum of 6.5” of rain yesterday”, meaning that they didn’t get the rain gauge emptied out before it overflowed. We have tornadoes that blanket the state. And even with our sparse population, there are still lots of injuries and millions of dollars in damage on a fairly regular basis.

A few weeks ago, we had a hail storm. One of those storms that makes the national news. The kind where the adjectives to describe the size of the hail still seem inadequate. We had hail that measured 8” in diameter hit our cars and house. Those were the hailstones that we measured. From the damage it would appear that some of those were even bigger when they actually made impact.

As you can imagine, we sustained some major damage. The insurance adjustors have commented that this is the biggest hail storm in history. I’m not sure how they measure that kind of thing, but I’ll take their word for it.

Why does all this matter? Well, we have some broken windows on our house. By some I mean we only sustained ten broken windows, which is practically a miracle. But they are broken and they need to be replaced. As part of the replacement process, I need to decide what sort of windows we want to replace the broken ones.

So we had the general contractor send a guy from the window company out. Actually, three guys from three window companies. That’s partly because we have three brands of windows on the house and partly because the general contractor wanted to figure out who would be best to work with. We’ve done a lot of work with this general contractor, and he gives me a discount when I help him out. My talking to three window salesman was worth the discount.

In case you haven’t noticed yet, I’m a bit sarcastic. It’s just my way of dealing with the world. It’s practically a second language (implying that English is my first…which sometimes I wonder whether I might have the two languages in reversed order). So the poor windows salesmen had to put up with my sarcastic opener.

After measuring the windows and determining the amount of damage, we sat down and started to talk about my options. I listened very attentively to all the window-speak. Words that I didn’t know what they really were (sashes, jambs, sills, muntins, drip caps, flashings, sidings, aprons, stools, stiles, casings etc.) and nodded my head appreciatively. Frankly, I was totally lost as to what all those options meant.

As usual, I dropped into my more comfortable tongue-in-cheek sarcasm. I told the salesman that I was looking for a fairly simple solution. You know, “perfectly see-through, self-cleaning, unbreakable, UV-diverting” windows that looked nice, were free, and fit the decor of my home on the inside and the look of the house on the outside.

The first salesman just looked at me dumbfounded and said “We don’t have any windows like that”. The second guy was a bit more creative and answered, “That’s quite the list of requirements you have.”. The third one hit the nail on the head with his response, “We can’t meet all those requirements, but depending on how you rank them, we can find something that will fit…with compromises”.

And that’s the point. Buying new windows is like so much that we encounter in life. There is no perfect solution that will meet all our hopes or dreams (our “requirements”, if you will). We’re going to have to make compromises. We’re going to have to rank what’s important and what we’re willing to compromise on.

And that’s the trick. Knowing what matters and then making a conscious decisions as to the compromises. It doesn’t work if you just sit back and say “oh whatever you think is best”. That won’t get you a solution that works for you. You need to take charge and explore the options and then weigh the possibilities and decide among them. It actually takes thought. All too often we just roll along, drifting from one thing to another without making conscious decisions about all sorts of things in our lives.

I know that’s something that I do far more often that I like. So starting today I’m going to make a lot more conscious decisions.

How about you?