I always love hearing from my friend Tracey, partly because she rides a Harley and also because has one of those top secret jobs that you can’t know anything about, even though I always try to find out something. Never works. She’s good.
As it turns out, she’s also a careful observer of everyday life lessons. This was the text I received from her this morning:
“My daughter Meg and I baked bbq chicken the other night in a grill pan. The bbq of course stuck to the pan and so I soaked it and scrubbed; some came off, but still a lot was baked on. So I soaked and scrubbed some more the next day… still very little progress. Finally i just left the pan without water in it and thought: ‘I need to find something to better scrub with.’ The next day, my daughter looks over at the pan and saw that all the burnt baked on pieces had flaked off the pan and she said ‘Wow - sometimes you just need to walk away and let things be, and they will fix themselves.’ Simple life lessons. I now have a pic of this pan on my phone to remind me that sometimes, you need to just let it be.”
I love this story for a couple reasons:
First, it reminds me that sometimes being is more powerful than doing. We’re part of an action-oriented society that likes to do, do, do, and go, go, go… and a lot of that time that’s OK because we get a lot of stuff done. But we all know that we often don’t get the best things done because we didn’t take the time to figure out who we want to BE before we start to DO.
Take our current COVID-19 situation, for example. It’s a struggle for many people who want to DO something to solve the problem when part of the answer is to just BE at home. It sucks for lots of reasons, and yet it’s true for millions of people right now. That being said, we have the grand opportunity to decide who we want to BE on the other side of this situation, and those choices ought to drive what we DO while we are weathering the storm. We will always remember what we did during this time, and so it makes sense to spend a little time figuring out who we want to BE when this becomes a story we tell down the road.
Another reason I love this story is that it reminds me that, despite our best intentions, it is often not in our capability or responsibility to “fix” some people in our lives. Rather, sometimes the best thing we can do, and the most loving action we can take, is to provide the right environment for others to be who they are, and to allow them to work through and resolve their issues within that environment. It’s not up to us to fix other people, just like other people ought not to try to fix us. When we allow them a safe place to be themselves — while maybe keeping a watchful eye on them to be sure they’re OK — we may find that the course of nature and its processes help people release the problems they’re dealing with, all on their own without us “scrubbing them off” of them. Not a perfect metaphor, but a good reminder for me, nonetheless.
Sometimes, like Tracey said, it makes sense to let it be.