“Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it’s not like you’re going to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.”
“To be, or not to be? That is the question – whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, AND, by opposing them, end them?”
“Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.”
I Love you, You’re Perfect, Now Change is a musical comedy with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro and music by Jimmy Roberts. It’s the second-longest running Off-Broadway musical. My wife and I saw the play in New York when it first opened and the title has stuck with me for many years. The idea that keeps solidifying in my brain is that there are some things we want to fix but can’t AND there are other things we want to fix but don’t need to.
When my wife and I were first married, we both tried valiantly to fix each other in ways that conformed to our personal needs, desires, preferences and traditions. After about 25 years, we both gave up our independent quests to “change” each other and started to accept the differences we had. After 53 years of marriage, we are actually embracing each other’s differences – well . . . . . some of them.
I was born with a good dose of OCD and ADHD. I can’t fix my DNA, but I can embrace my ability to hyper-focus intensively on an interesting topic for a long period of time and get things done. Oh, many people have tried to fix me to no avail. Yes, I can bounce around from one thing to another with non-sequiturs galore, but give me a task that captures my attention and I’m gone to the world. Hey, for better or for worse, that’s how I have kept producing posts for almost 10 years.
We all know the prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” While I find that prayer helpful and true, I’m taking a slightly different angle here.
I’m proposing that we need to be much more discerning in the discriminations we make regarding what and who needs to get “fixed,” and we need to be much more compassionate in the ways we communicate our perspectives, beliefs, points of view, values, etc. In short, we need to reduce our inclinations to “fix” what we see as broken AND to embrace what may be seen as different, marginal, or outside the norm.
For example: LGBTQ+ people don’t need to be fixed. Ideas that escape from the confines of tradition don’t need to be corralled. Many behavioral issues don’t need to be drugged into conformity.
A friend of mine recently shared that her grandmother had been hospitalized in a psychiatric facility after she had given birth to 4 children in six years and was struggling with postpartum depression. The medical community and her family “fixed” the problem by keeping her institutionalized for 25 years – heavily sedated and frequently subjected to ECT “treatments.” Perhaps, a little more support and a much warmer embrace of her struggles could have prevented forced isolation from her family for a large share of her life.
Two books deepened my understanding of this dynamic between fixing and embracing.
In Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane, a married couple of 20 years find their marriage dissolving. Malcom runs a failing bar and Jess, a lawyer, leaves her firm when she was passed over for partner. In her frustrated state, she hooks up with another lawyer and seriously jeopardizes what was once a happy marriage. They are both very attractive, but Jess is more open to broadening her world and Malcom seems stuck in his local dive. While their marriage endured several failed attempts at having children, Jess’s affair results in a bitter separation. The power of Keane’s observations rests in her ability to demonstrate how love can survive multiple events and bad decisions that fray the original connection. She is able to find grace in a distressingly ordinary world. For me, the book could have just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, been entitled “Half Full.” In any marriage, there are forces that bring a couple together and forces that tear them apart. The question becomes, how can we embrace what’s present in the relationship (the half that’s full) instead of trying to fix what’s missing (the half that’s empty).
In The Best Strangers in the World, Ari Shapiro shares his experiences as an openly gay man coming out as a 16 year old Jewish kid in a WASPY neighborhood as well as his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama and traveling the world to cover war stories. Shapiro’s goal in this book to encourage readers to listen more closely and carefully to the people we meet – strangers, friends, and family alike. As an award-winning host of NPR’s All Things Considered, Shapiro brings unique perspectives on the challenges of being different. Shapiro has not only had an extraordinary rise in public radio, but he is also an accomplished singer/performer and plays occasionally with the band, Pink Martini. Shapiro says, “Part of Pink Martini’s secret is that they’ve fully embraced what makes them different from everyone else. And in so doing, they nestled into a spot that is authentically and singularly theirs without ever chasing a trend or a fad.” You could say the same of Ari.
It turns out that we are much better off embracing who we are than trying to “fix” who we are not.
So what are some things we want to fix, but can’t; some things we want to fix, but don’t need to; and some things that we want to fix and should. Finally, when we are not “fixing,” what might we be embracing?
Let me share a beginning list of possible answers to those questions and then you can add your own.
What people want to fix but can’t: Death, personalities, the past, and about 150 of the 195 countries in the world including the U.S.
What people want to “fix” but don’t need to: LBGTQ+ people, differences of opinions, interests, ideas, and values.
What some people want to fix and should. Racism, sexism, nationalism, climate change, public education, affordable housing, public safety, foreign relations, public trust, health care, gun control, immigration, regulations, beliefs, taxes/IRS, the Supreme Court, Republican extremism, Democratic execution, the Senate, the Electoral College, the Constitution, voting rights, civil rights, abortion rights
What I wish more people would want to embrace: Possibilities, people at the margin, the present moment, peace, new ideas, adventure, love, truth, wisdom, environmental stewardship and joy.
As you can see, there are so many things we should fix. Soon!! it seems crazy to me that we waste so much time trying to fix the things we can’t fix and the things we don’t need to fix. Perhaps if we were more focused on what to embrace we might just fix the things that need to be fixed more effortlessly and civilly.
Shakespeare asked us to consider how much time and energy we should expend trying to drain our swamp of troubles. Kornfield implores us to invest in waking up instead of “fixing” our hard-wired personalities. Einstein encouraged us to widen our circle of compassion and embrace All. The comedy “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change” suggests that it may be better to embrace what is present in a relationship instead of trying to fix something that may not be working according to our particular preferences or neurotic needs as the case may be.
I’m hoping we can make better discriminations on how we spend our time and what battles we choose to fight. I’m hoping we can communicate with more care and compassion. I wish we could get into a better FLOW of life: Full, Loving, Open, Whole-Hearted being. I’m hoping we can wake up and shift our energies from “fixing” the past to embracing the present and creating the future. May it be so.
Also published on Medium.
One of your best Ricky! Thank you!
Wise words once again, Rick. Thanks for sharing these thoughts and expressing them so beautifully.