I am a results kind of person. My husband even more so. We are get shit done people. And so life gets super hard when getting shit done gets complicated, or we are forced to recognize that there are actually things in life that are not “fixable.”

Oh, the agony! We may take it to an extreme actually. My guys try to fix everything before it gets thrown out or moved on. YouTube has lessons on repairing any and all things big and small.

There is satisfaction in the end result of having fixed something. It works again. It saves the money of buying a new one. Once you have something, there’s attachment to it, and that makes fixing it an act of love (or obligation). It is also an accomplishment to learn something new. And to have fixed it yourself is an act of self-sufficiency. All good things.

But there is a limit. Some things are simply not fixable. Sometimes results are not the end goal (and yes, I get a slight twinge when I write this). But especially when it comes to things involving people, some things are just not fixable.

Recently, I was part of this conversation on a blog community, and someone wrote that she was finally coming to terms with a lifetime of guilt around trying to fix unfixable things. The pressure she had placed on herself for years, since her childhood, to find solutions to things that she is only now realizing were never fixable in the first place. She said that she recognized this after her parents passed away. She could see in retrospect that none of it could have ever been fixed. Her reflection keeps rolling around in my head. Fixing things. Achieving results. Getting it done. So now onto incorporating ritual as a way to find some balance.

Ritual is a weird word. It is a process more then result. It is a day-to-day routine that is carefully constructed with care. It is ongoing. That’s part of my resistance to them, and also my need to study and experiment and learn from them. In many ways, my practice of ritual is too a road to a result — more self-sufficiency and a better me.

Maybe it’s a dead end road? Or maybe it’s a winding road to a breathtaking summit? I like to think about the second. Rituals, results and whatever there is in between, the learning and mistakes, the bits of grime that sticks in the crevices of the two sides of the R&R coin, all of it is the good road.

I don’t think there’s a wrap up to this post. Just a winding reflection on the praxis of R&R, and where I find myself in that mess each day.