Have you ever slammed your car trunk closed repeatedly as it bounced back up at you, when your kid’s bicycle was in the way of the latch? How about hit the enter key harder (and harder) after the website didn’t respond the first time?
If you’re nodding your head along with me, then you know that although adding a little (or a lot) of force sometimes helps, it often does not. Your child’s bicycle wheel will be blocking the latch even after a few more pounds of force are applied, and the nonresponsive website will not respond more quickly because of the increased force on your enter key. Rather than try to get by on brute force alone, we would benefit a lot more from finding real solutions: move the bike, and reload the page!
In a similar vein, when we make mistakes, our first instinct is to reach for the quick fix. A flared temper coupled with hurtful words? A dozen flowers follow. Doesn’t work? We try two dozen. Albeit more elegant than slamming the trunk for the second time, it is not necessarily more wise. The first dozen didn’t work; the second bouquet will likely be equally ineffective.
Solving problems often requires more than more, it requires different. We need to get to the root of the problem and see how it began. We have to learn new behaviors and new ways of thinking, and how to set things up differently. Flowers are for small challenges and minor mistakes, new behaviors are needed for systematic problems.
This same concept applies in our internal quest for spiritual growth and greatness. Yes, there are times that a little more will and determination will get us through a spiritual challenge. Often though, we must do more than just more, we must do different. The classic mussar books spend surprisingly little time simply encouraging us to do better, rather, the bulk of their teaching is helping us understand ourselves and the world so that we can learn to do things differently. Without that knowledge and understanding in place, we run the risk of simply slamming the trunk, harder and harder, and wondering why we’re still in the same place where we started.
What is that knowledge, those understandings? Time to start learning!
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