Came a cry from the sitting kitchen: "Mo-o-o-m-m-m-m! There's something wrong with this computer!"

Seething gently, because I'd just settled down to do the dishes, I trotted obediently over to where my younger kid was struggling with his long-overdue science report. The cursor was making its way steadily down the screen, one line at a time, without human intervention. I reached for the return key and tapped its side sharply and the cursor stopped. Backspacing to get rid of the extra hard returns, I explained to the kid that the return key on this keyboard sometimes stuck. "Oh," said the kid and got back to trying, reluctantly, to define the difference between force and energy.

Over the dishes, I thought, this is nuts. There must be three or four old keyboards lying around here. Changing the keyboard would be no problem - a matter of unplugging the old and plugging in the new. Or if none of the old boards is any good, I could get a new one. Why, instead of doing that, do I go on living with a sticky return key? Why do I live with this keyboard at all? I don't like it, never have, since I got the new computer. It has a cheap and clacky feel to it.

The reason: I'm very good at adapting to imperfection - at living with situations that are sub par and learning to ignore them, figuring they can't be fixed. I know where this behaviour comes from. In the past, it was an invaluable adaptation to life as I'd had to live it. And I am a patient person, which is not a bad thing at all. But sometimes this pattern is counterproductive, as when I took my office apart, ran out of energy before I could finish working on it, and have lived with my stuff in boxes for months since. At what point does patience cross the line into sloth? At what point does endurance become paralysis?

I found myself wondering where else in my life I fall into this pattern, without even noticing. I could, without even working at it, come up with about half a dozen instances where I'd chosen to endure something that I cou ld, and should, have done something about. Oy. Oh well. It is Lent, after all.

This endurance business is one of my unconscious "maps" - a set of assumptions that I take so thoroughly for granted that I'm not even aware of them. We all have maps. We couldn't possibly live without them. If we tried, we'd find ourselves having to think through every single decision from scratch - like trying to manouevre in a city where the roads kept moving around. Purely crazy-making.

I had assumed that my proper response to a suboptimal state of things was to endure and adapt to it. But is that always what I should do? Sometimes we stick to a particular route long after it's become the less sensible way to go. We've always got from Point A to Point B via Smith Street and Jones Avenue and Brown Boulevard. Now they've built a new road connecting A and B far more swiftly and easily, but we stick to Smith, Jones and Brown, not because we've decided that we want to, but because we've failed to observe that there are any other possible routes to take.

Lent could be a good time to sort through the maps, to examine the assumptions we take so completely for granted - to see which ones are good and still make sense, and which ones are silly or outdated, or were just plain wrong in the first place. Lent is a good time for reality-checks. I don't have to put up with a sticking return key; I have the choice of replacing the board or not replacing the board, but it's not a situation for which endurance is really required.

It's easy to assume that reality checks must necessarily involve penitence. "I have to be honest with you" usually precedes an owwie. But in fact, sometimes re-examining maps can be liberating, as I found out when I thought about keyboards. Maybe this has something to do with that stunning bit from Isaiah 58 about fasting, a piece that's been dodging through my life a lot in the last couple of weeks: "Is this not the fast that [God chooses]: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?" Maybe what we should give up for Lent isn't our indulgences (although they could usually use a good radical pruning) but the shackles that we should have laid down long since?

I'll try to remember that next time something goes wrong. Maybe it's a situation in which all I can do is hold tight and whimper, but at least let me figure out that that is my only choice. At least, dear Lord, let me be aware of the pattern. Because it's through awareness, hard as it comes sometimes, that we do our best growing towards God.

The keyboard is behaving itself now. I'll leave it for the moment. But if it starts sticking again, I think I might go hunt for something better.