I bought some replacement shoelaces for my daughter's shoes recently. Now the hard part of that project is remembering to buy the laces. The old, knotted strings had to go, but more than once we walked out of Walmart with no replacement strings. Finally we remembered to get them.
I sat down to perform the surgical procedure. As I began pulling out the leather thong, I noticed that I could not find the other end...
Then I noticed that the laces weave in and out all the way around the heel. I had always thought those laces were purely decorative, but it turns out that they really connect to the tying end.
That presented me with two problems. First, I would have trouble threading the laces through a 3-inch subterranean pathway. It's hard to push a string, especially through a long, tight, curved sheath. And the other problem was that I had bought laces that were way too short. Dang.
So, I laced them back up, and forced my kid to walk around with knotty shoes again. It wasn't too long before we got some longer strings. By then I had mentally engineered a process for threading the strings.
The big surprise is that it worked. I taped the new string to the old string and carefully pulled out the old as I threaded the new.
What I expected to be so hard turned out to be easy. I often find that to be the case. The hard things turn out to be easy. But I never know until I try.
