My dad always taught me that you need the right tool for the right job. He was a construction worker who built or retrofitted a good number of the buildings in the Manhattan skyline. His father who was a carpenter for the New York City Library who shared his skills with him. My father had five daughters, no sons, so when something needed to be done, we were brought in to help. As we moved out of the house, he assembled us a tool kit, so we had the basics to take care of ourselves. Growing up my sisters and I helped add an addition to our home, putting up sheet rock, laying floors, hauling stone or rock, whatever was needed. When you grow up doing something you don’t think about it and assume everyone has had the experience you did. It also helped that my mother was a MacGyver of sorts too. She was an incredibly creative and could fix, paint, plant, or rig up whatever she needed to solve a problem cheaply. They were  “make do” and keep things running kind of folks. During most of my childhood money was in short supply. This instilled some of the same ideals, skills and tolerances for fixing and dealing with broke shit. 

Growing up we had a TV early on and it was the center of our entertainment until my mother would kick us out of the house telling us to go blow the stink off ourselves. She would follow that up with “don’t come back inside unless you are bleeding and use the neighbors’ bathrooms.” Many of us read too but TV was king for after dinner entertainment for the entire family. That black and white TV logged millions of hours, long past it’s prime. Other families upgraded to color, what we did was guess at what colors the dresses were on the Miss America Pageant. Those were the days you had to get up to change the channel, in fact I was the one closest to the set often appointed channel monitor. It didn’t hurt that I read the TV lineup every day and most knowledgeable about our viewing options for the evening. Not hard to do as this was back when there were about five stations and no cable. 

When the TV’s channel dial finally wore out and the dial would spin freely like a top on the nub my dad got a needle nose plier and gave it to me to use to grab hold of that nub and change the channel. We didn’t need to buy a new TV much less a knob, we just needed to keep the pliers on the top of the TV. Which we did for years. When I got into high school in the mid 70’s the TV finally gave up the ghost and died. Then my folks upgraded to color. I got finally got to see the dramatic change from black and white to color in the Wizard of OZ for the first time when I was fifteen years old. I knew it happened but had never seen it until then. Over the years I was the TV tech, adjusting color, brightness, and of course channels. I would come home from college to see my parents watching orange people on the TV instead of adjusting the color. My mother explained that my father had suggested they  just wait for me to come home for Thanksgiving rather than mess with it. 

Over the years my resourcefulness has been both good and bad. Like my parents sometimes I live with circumstances and people long past the get rid of date. I don’t do this because I think I deserve less, my first instinct is to tweak, adjust, adapt then after that doesn’t work assess the bigger picture. In looking at the bigger picture I then make the best choice for the overall quality of life. When situations start to cause friction in our lives, it generally starts small, like water flowing over the stone, we don’t see it making grooves or wearing the stone down  with our eyes in real time but rather we see over time, when we pay attention. That slight friction starts to rub harder, get to be more of a bother, a frustration or ache. Ultimately if not addressed the problem slowly moves up into causing pain in small waves, then increasing in more discomfort. 

All of this is not unlike the frog in hot water example. If you put a frog in hot water, it jumps out immediately but if you put a frog in cold water and turn the heat on low until the water gradually boils the frog doesn’t notice and it kills the frog. I think in many instances we are in situations that morph and change over time, jobs, relationships, living circumstances and we are happy at first. However, over time things change, we change, the job, relationship all change, and it is no longer a good fit. This can happen slowly. By being connected to our bodies and noticing how we react to stimuli is a great early indicator when things start to head south, but few of us are connected to our bodies. We are raised to think our way through life, to reason, to plan, chart and analyze. I am not saying these are not good tools. They are only good if you use the appropriate data. We don’t always, we discount our feelings, our bodily reactions even when it is visceral, and our intuition. All of these tools are some of our oldest and have always been at our disposal in creating better lives. 

Many times, those adjustments are all we need. We have come into a culture where we dismiss any discomfort or inconvenience and impulsively throw out a person or circumstances instead of tweak, adjust or be uncomfortable enough to lean into the learning curve of the lesson that is being presented to us. We live in a disposable world and have for decades. That is changing with the recycle, reuse and repurpose mentality that has blossomed.

What I find the hardest part in this process is to be able to tell the difference of what is healthy uncomfortable growth and what is unhealthy avoidance, stubbornness, blindness or ennui? I find the body helps here most. It holds the key to what fits and what doesn’t. More often than not the scary thing that pulls at you, the hard thing, the thing we think we cannot do is often the right thing. Sometimes growth and change happens in an instant, or we manage to do it in leaps and bounds, other times, many times it is at a crawling pace and painfully slow. Just like the water eroding  the rock over time it is not always visible to the naked eye but non the less it is happening. 

Even in using these tools, concepts and methods to figure out if what is happening is a healthy release of things that no longer serves me or am I or staying in the unhealthy to avoid the unknown.  The assessment of what being uncomfortable means in that situation is key, uncomfortable happens at the beginning of good things and at the end of things that no longer fit us figuring out which is which is the hard part. That being said I also used a needle nose plier to adjust my gas stove for 13 years in my old apartment after melting the knobs the first week I moved in. So, there is that… that thrill of MacGyvering a fast unconventional solution as a quick fix too. Wisdom is knowing what’s the right tool for the right job and a lot of times it’s a needle nose plier.

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