‘Want a Guarantee? Buy a Toaster’

Want a guarantee? Buy a toaster.

RIP: Arthur Malacos – 19/08/1960 – 12/10/2022

I saw this line in a movie back in the eighties, and it has stuck with me ever since. It got me thinking, and without wanting to sound too morbid, the only guarantee any of us are truly given is the date, still unknown to us, when we pass from this earthly plane. Everything before then is ours to shape. We have a choice to create a life worth living before that final guarantee arrives.

We are wired to want certainty for the rest of it too. We want to know a relationship will last before we let ourselves fall. We want to know the business will work before we leave the job. We want proof the leap will pay off before we take a single step.

Here is the gentle truth. Beyond that one certainty, life does not hand out guarantees. The only place you will reliably find one is stapled to the side of a toaster. A warranty, a money-back promise, certainty in a box. Life itself offers no such thing, and waiting around for one is one of the quietest ways we miss our own lives.

Think about your best decisions. Loving someone, having a child, starting something of your own, leaving something that was hurting you. Not one of them came with a guarantee. You stepped forward not knowing how it would end and did it anyway. That willingness, not the certainty, is what made it worthwhile.

Martin Luther King said ‘Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.’ You do not need the whole plan. You only need enough courage for the next step, and then the one after that. The staircase reveals itself as you climb.

And this is not a judgement, we all cling to the safe and certain sometimes. It is simply a nudge to notice where you have been waiting for a guarantee that was never coming, and to take one honest step anyway.

‘Where in your life have you been waiting for a guarantee before you let yourself begin?’