The End of the Fix...

I have decided to call a moratorium on what our culture defines as “self-improvement”; from this day forward I have decided to end all attempts to “fix” myself. No more… I have had enough.

I have very few childhood memories, really I could count them on just one hand, but the strongest, clearest, and most persistent is the sheer dead weight of the times, in which I wondered out loud and to myself... “what is wrong with me??!!??

The first time I formed and asked this most basic of questions, I must have been four or five, and potentially even three years old…as my little hand was quite chubby and dimpled. I can see it now, reaching out to grasp the flowing skirt of my mother standing at the sink, hands immersed in hot, soapy water – washing the dinner dishes. I tugged on her skirt, looked the long way up to her averted face, and asked in the most plaintive of little voices…”Mama, what is wrong with me???”

It took years and years of therapy and discovery to understand that the sexual molestation by my uncle and the intense, violent, and unpredictable rages of my mother were the root cause of my sense of “wrongness” that was so pervasive the first two and a half decades of my life, that I couldn’t even imagine a time in which I might be some form of “right”. (Or perhaps, I just came in with it as a Karmic debt…I do not know and it does not matter.)

Then in my thirties I began to breathe the cooling air of being at least somewhat “right”. I found and followed a spiritual leader of extraordinary capacity, kindness, and insight. I began to lose interest in finding the reflection of myself, in the eyes of others, as the only way in which I could relate to myself. I began to feel right in my own skin…but still, I sought to fix some illusive “wrong” that I could feel, but could not quite grasp.

Well…no more, in exactly 56 days I will turn 55 years old and as that bellwether number approaches, and I officially enter “middle age”, I have decided to just STOP.

This is no small decision, our shared American culture is fraught thru and thru with the subtle notion that there is something slightly wrong with us, which can be fixed, (yippee!!), if we only purchase the right chewing gum, hair products, bathroom fixtures, air fresheners, dog chews, and car oils. (Yes, our collective wrongness extends past our singular person and pervades our homes, cars, and even our pets.)

I had a friend once say to me that she didn’t understand the notion that “Americans” have a skewed perspective, she felt that people are the same the world over…and of course that is true at the depth of our humanity, we all are born, will die, and will suffer if we do not find the core of ourselves, but at the surface - in our eccentricities and collective personas, we are quite different from the strict Germans, the fun loving Italians, the quiet and controlled Japanese…and we Americans…we love to fix things. We’ll fix your crops, your marriages, your water treatment plants, even your government if you give us even the smallest opportunity.

Square jawed, strong arms, white hats, and total commitment to getting it right, is a cultural phenomenon that goes way past the romanticized wild west out of which we drew our national personality.

Just yesterday, on my AOL online “news” scroll, I found a product being produced and sold by none other than Joan Rivers, a woman who no longer resembles any definable age, who has found the “fix” for thinning hair. It seems when women begin to bald, due to stress, environmental impact, age, or any number of circumstances, they do so in an all over style, rather than the circle at the back of the head that characterizes “male pattern balding”. I am familiar with the sight of my own scalp, shining back at me in the mirror, thru my thinning hair…and now, thanks to Ms. Rivers I can “fix” that problem with color coded scalp powders, a powder that can be scrubbed onto the scalp disguising the tell tale signs of thinning hair by turning your head the color of your roots. (Does anyone besides me, remember Ron Popeil’s hair in a can for men. It was an aerosol version of what Ms. Rivers is now selling, sprayed on the fine hairs in that “male pattern balding” shiny spot at the back of the head?)

Ms. Rivers product sells for $29.50, and is reportedly flying off the shelves. Now, along with wigs, hair extensions, scarves, hats, and surgical hair replacement procedures… you can just color inside the lines to “fix” your thinning head of hair.

You see… “fixing” what is wrong, is what we do best…

Cue the organ music right here… dun’t, dun’t, dun’t, dun…, here is the rub. Self-improvement, or more accurately “fixing what is wrong with you”, costs you the very energy necessary to find and embrace the potential freedom of self-acceptance. Even the smallest measure of self-improvement sets your gaze on an illusory future in which you will somehow arrive at the shores of “all right now”, and be able to rest from bearing the loathsome burden of fixing yourself.

At this point you may want to have me arrested for such heresy as this desire to, “stop improving myself!!??!!”…Martha, say it ain’t so…

But hear me out, all the great thinkers and leaders the world round and throughout recorded time, have posited the notion that there is no such thing as the self. They say it in a great many different ways, but from Jung to Buddha they agree, the “self” we are so busy fixing, is a figment of our quite active imaginations, coupled with childhood emotional survival strategies…which turn into habits of behavior, which we eventually come to think of as “me”.

So if we can even entertain the notion of stopping self-improvement, what then should, or even can, take its place. What - after all - should we spend the coin of our most precious asset, our time, doing if we give up, improving the self.

The answer, (cue organ music), is… Growth.

Spiritual, Emotional, Psychological, growth is the stuff of the stars. It is the active internal push that turns mere mortals into selfless heroes, mere self-absorbed adult children into selfless givers, wasted lives into lives that matter.

Let me give you a very recent example.

Dr. James Hall of Alma, Michigan went down in a small plane accident yesterday, over the Great Lakes. His body has not been recovered and likely will not be….however his medical bag was, and in it was found this note…

"Dear All, We love you. We lost power over the middle [of] Lake Michigan and turning back. We are praying to God that all [will] be taken care of. We love you. Jim."

This is an extraordinary example of selfless Growth. In the middle of, what had to be a wild plummet to his death, Dr. Hall had the presence of mind to think of his loved ones and the needs they would face in the hours after his death, but not just his family, was noticed and cared for…as the “All” in his salutation speaks to the families of the other passengers who were about to share his same fate, and even his small town and its inhabitants are remembered in the “All” of his opening statement.

This is Growth…and it makes “self-improvement”, an embarrassment at best and a sin at worst.

Growth shelters the All, is concerned with the many, pays tribute to the collective, concerns itself with the broad strokes, honors humanity, and is humble by nature. Selflessness is the wheelhouse of Growth, as growth cannot be accomplished until the sights are set on giving up the “self”, in favor of the Oneself.

I do not know how much Growth I have accomplished in my, soon to be 55 years, I do know that it is the only thing worthy of the remainder of my time, short or long, I intend to focus on Growth and give up entirely the self-serving, short-sightedness of “self” improvement.

I have committed to bend whatever writing talent I might possess to this decision, I want to be a chronicler of Growth – a voice that decries the absurdity of “self-improvement” and banishes the notion that we can improve the self, while the many suffer untold agonies.

I want to be your “reporter on the ground”, the Christiane Amanpour (high integrity CNN chief international correspondent – in case you aren’t familiar with her), of the search for, and understanding of, Growth.

This is my first report. I hope it has served you.

I will continue to send you these essay’s, and I will return to posting them on my blog at www.theviewfromhere-adayre.blogspot.com, if you would like to share them with others.

Adayre R. Miller

7/26/10