Short term pain for long term gain.

That quote has stuck with me from the August Lisbon School Board meeting, about their construction woes. Over the past month, Alliant Energy has been doing work on underground in the alleys behind our business, where many of us who work in uptown choose to park. It’s been a minor inconvenience, and part of that is not knowing which level of the alley they would be working on during certain days of the week. One day, the upper lot was fine, the very next there’s a road closed sign in front of you as you were looking to turn.  Finding a parking place is a minor headache of the working day, especially as an editor when you might have to give one up at the end of the day and when you return, that spot is gone again.

But infrastructure improvements are important, and if they’re being done will eventually benefit those in the uptown, no matter how many minor headaches they throw in the spanner.

And when I look at this, I just think of the infrastructure improvements my sister Andrea is enduring over in Tipton. She lives in an apartment on Cedar Street (which many in the town know as Main Street). And Cedar Street from about Seventh Street to Second Street was torn up in Tipton most of this summer. I didn’t realize that there was no other access to her apartment aside from the front door until she shared the story of she and the kids discovering that one day after work began and they were landlocked to the apartment until crews realized and were able to properly address the matter.

When I went down to Tipton for an early birthday dinner with her, my niece, nephew and visiting aunt and uncle in early September, the work on many of the roads was just being finalized.

But a new headache for Andrea is happening, as the sidewalk work outside her apartment is happening this week. She, her husband Justin and the kids will have to relocate to a motel while the sidewalk work is completed, as it will shut off their access to the apartment while the sidewalks are drying after being poured. Not how she wants to spend her birthday, no doubt, no matter how nice the renovated Tipton Motel may be.

And suddenly, being frustrated about a minor inconvenience like having to circle the block to find a parking space doesn’t seem as much of a headache any more.

It’s all about perspective. Suddenly, that headache isn’t as bad as what someone else is enduring.