LEAVE IT ALONE

One of my greatest challenges is knowing when to help or fix things and when to leave things alone. I'd like to believe I'm the jack of many trades and this self-perception often results in me making matters worse. Recently, my kitchen sick decided to fall apart and we couldn't figure out what exactly had happened. We continued trying to run the water without looking under the sink. Me being me, I decided to put on my " Mr. Fit it" hat and did a little investigating under the kitchen sink. To my unfortunate surprise, the entire cabinet was now flooded with water!! Instead of calling an expert, I decided I knew what to do (boy was I wrong). After hours of pulling, screwing, twisting and turning, I decided to give up. I gathered myself from the kitchen floor with my pants and hair now saturated in water. I'm not sure why I thought I had the answers and in fact I'd probably made things worse. Why didn't I just leave it alone and call the maintenance experts?

Many of the disappointments I've faced in life have simple happened because I thought I knew best. Have you ever been too prideful or too full of yourself and thought you had all the answers only to discover you were absolutely wrong? I'm not sure if in these times I'm most disappointed to discover I was wrong or discovering that despite my efforts, there was still no resolve. Perhaps maybe I'm just too impatient to allow things to work themselves out... This mindset is most prevalent when we have experienced hurt and pain at the hands of another individual.  We set out to either fix it of fix THEM and when I say fix them I'm referring to vengeance. If you've lived long enough, I'm sure you've discovered nothing positive will come out of trying to FIX others simply because it's not our job or our right to seek vengeance on another. In fact, by doing so you put yourself at a much greater risk of making matters worse. What is our discomfort with leaving things alone? Perhaps if everything was in our ability to fix then they wouldn't have broken to begin with... We often identify ourselves as "broken" after a relationship has ended when the reality is YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE BROKEN BECAUSE A RELATIONSHIP HAS BROKEN... Far too many times we've spend unnecessary time harboring on the impacts of a broken situation. We spend far too much time trying to fix that which was not meant to be fixed and this results in the feelings of brokenness. By doing this, we never get to see the benefits of leaving some people and or things ALONE.

All the time I spent trying to fix my kitchen sink, I could've consulted with an expert and had an entire new sink... We can never experience an upgrade trying to fix a downgrade... I've encountered many women who identify themselves as broken from a bad relationship, and despite the fact that an upgrade, be in within themselves or someone new, is right in front of them, they end up missing it harboring over something that's broken and cannot be fixed. It's almost like giving CPR to a person that's been dead for years... There is no alternative to DEAD because once something's dead, it's DEAD. I've learned that it's impossible to fix everything and everyone. In fact, it's not our job to fix many of the problems we face in life but to learn from those things, which in many instances requires us to leave it or them ALONE... The reality is, it's no secrete what we end up discovering about others. In fact, chances are we knew all along. We will end up saving ourselves a lot of unnecessary hurt and pain and MONEY if we learn to simply leave some things ALONE...