My job is to figure out how to make it work, not to identify why it can't.
The repairman's disposition
I come back to a sentence I bookmarked from 2023:
"My job is to figure out how to make it work, not to identify why it can't.”
I wrote it in my journal.
I wrote it about something practical, as I keep finding it applies to people.
There is a version of caring about someone that is mostly diagnosis. You study what went wrong, catalog the failures, and build a case. It feels like rigor and sometimes looks like honesty, but in practice, it is a way of staying still, dressed up as thinking.
Men are accused of being fixers, and the accusation is fair as far as it goes. When someone we love brings us a problem, we reach for solutions before we have properly sat with what is being said. We want to move the thing. Feeling it, holding it, staying with its texture—that part makes us restless.
So the criticism lands: we fix too quickly, we fix the wrong thing, and we fix when what is needed is presence, but I think the critique has a shadow side that goes unexamined.
Because the opposite failure is just as real, there are people, a few friends of mine, who become so fluent in the language of why something cannot work that they never genuinely try to make it work. They analyze and talk about it, but nothing moves.
I recently told my wife this: “It’s not that men are quick to fix things, but that we prefer the work of difficulty, and women stay in the examination of it, and it’s vital to understand that the examination of difficulty can easily become a substitute for the work of difficulty.”
I learned quickly that you should never say that to women (but this is a safe space, right? 😂).
What I return to in that sentence is not the fixer instinct exactly, but the question of where I direct my attention once I understand what I am dealing with.
Understanding is not the destination but the starting point.
Adam Phillips once observed that we are often more attached to our grievances than to the relationships they live inside. The grievance has integrity; it knows what it thinks. The relationship requires ongoing revision of what you thought you understood about the other person.
To move from why it cannot work to how it might is not a change in information but a change in posture. It is decided that your role is not to adjudicate but to build, and that building is slow, imprecise, and asks you to keep showing up after the diagnosis is complete.
