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Burnish: (v) to polish something by rubbing.
An important exercise:
Add up all the hours you and I have spent complaining, resisting, avoiding or diminishing the need to improve something. Now compare that to the number of hours it would have taken to do the job.
Every single time, the amount of energy expended in bitching exceeds the required minutes necessary to burnish up the situations in our lives.
Case in point: when I was much younger and rented an apartment, my parents gave me a beat-up coffee table. It was light brown wood, so every little scrape, nick and stain was very noticeable. Bluntly, I did not care. I was a punk.
One day a girlfriend of mine came in and told me that if I took some furniture polish to the table, it would look a hundred percent better. I nodded my head, simulating interest, but inwardly dismissed all her claims. She made the point three more times before she finally walked in, polish and cloth in hand, and quickly–no more than five minutes–transformed that piece of worn down trash into a burnished surface.
It was so shiny that I could actually look down and see my face.
I didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry over her interference. Before I could decide which profile to select, she gave me a quick hug and said, “You’re a man. You’re often too dumb to do what’s necessary.”
She left the room.
My problem was not being a man. My difficulty was that I did not believe I was worthy of a polished table, so I decided to leave it as ugly and unkempt as I felt myself.
Published by Jonathan Cring
7 years ago 
