What’s Needful

said “The pathological approach to life looks at everything as negative and needing to be fixed, repaired, changed, healed, cured, you name the word and it has something to do with anything and everything other than ‘being with it.'”

I thought about that for a bit.

As a Numenist, we don’t teach that things need to be “fixed” or any of that other stuff. We are very much of the “if it ain’t broke” school, and we are of the celebrate and enjoy it school, too. If it exists, it deserves to be admired, understood, and accepted. Only if it’s broke should we don anything about it. Our first instinct is to accept it for what it is, to admire it as it exists, to appreciate how it fits into the world and our moment with it. It is, and it has a right to stay exactly the way it is, if that’s what it wants to do.

We only try to fix it when it’s broke, and we try to fix it in ways it wants to be fixed, not in the ways we think it should be fixed.

I’m very much a “leave it be” sort of person, which is probably why I’m so attracted to Numenism. There are things in Numenism I find hard to do and harder to live up to, but for the most part, it suits me very well.

Our attitude towards charity and broken things, for example. Numenism teaches the lessons of community and family, which means we reach out to one another to help in needful ways – feed the hungry, clothe the cold, house the homeless, change the flat tire, prop up the drooping flower (and water it, too, most likely), sweep up the broken glass – you know, practical charity, the everyday acts of kindness and consideration that make life worth living. We don’t help people who don’t want help if it’s obvious to us they really can do it themselves, or at least should have the chance to try it themselves. We don’t support laws that take away autonomy – those nanny laws are crippling our country by teaching people they can’t do it themselves, and that’s so wrong.

If someone asks for help, or we offer help, we try to give what’s needed. It’s silly to give someone food stamps when they’ve got plenty of food but are in desperate need of gasoline to get to work. It’s silly to give someone a gasoline voucher when what they really need is a way to pay off an unexpected medical bill. It’s practically harmful to give someone water when what they need is DEET.

Feed the hungry, change the flat tire, put out the fire – true charity is doing what needs to be done, at the time it needs to be done, and for those for whom it needs doing.

I think that’s kind of why it bothers me so much I’ve written my legislators about the bail-outs. The people who need the help aren’t the CEOs and upper management of these businesses, it’s the people well below them – the tenants who lose their homes because their landlords defaulted on the mortgage, the people unemployed because the company structured their pay in so unbalanced a way that they’d rather fire 10 essential people than take the comparatively small pay cut to keep them employed and the business forging ahead.

We don’t need to give charity to these businesses in the way we’ve done it – it isn’t needful and will cause greater harm in the long run.

We simply need to pause and pay attention to what’s really happening and what’s really needed, and provide that.

We need to know what’s around us, to appreciate it, to admire it, as it is, and only fix those parts that are actually broken.