What to Do When You Can't Fix It

There is a category of situation that most advice is not written for. A diagnosis that will not improve. A parent who is going, slowly, and will keep going. A loss that has already happened. These do not have steps, and the arrival of steps — from well-meaning people, from articles, from oneself at three in the morning — is part of what makes them wearing.

The Tao Te Ching is unusually well suited to this ground, and for a specific reason: it is not primarily a book about solving things. Two chapters in particular are addressed to what remains when solving is off the table.

Most Advice Is Built for Problems

A problem is a situation with a solution in it, and almost everything written about difficulty assumes that shape — identify it, break it down, take the first step. That machinery is good, and it is what should be reached for whenever there is something to reach for.

What is less often said is what happens when the machinery is applied to a situation that has no solution in it. It does not simply fail and stop. It runs, produces plans, and returns each time to the same place, and the person running it concludes that the failure is theirs. A large amount of the exhaustion around unfixable situations is generated this way — not by the situation, which is heavy enough, but by an apparatus running continuously against something it cannot get purchase on.

Hardening Is Not Strength

The instinctive response to a situation like this is to brace — to become harder, hold everything more tightly, get through it by force. Chapter 76 puts that instinct next to something that undercuts it.

"Man during life is tender and delicate. When he dies he is stiff and stark. The ten thousand things, the grass as well as the trees, are while they live tender and supple. When they die they are rigid and dry. Thus the hard and the strong are the companions of death. The tender and the delicate are the companions of life" (chapter 76, Paul Carus, 1898).

The observation underneath the image is a plain one: rigidity is what arrives at the end of a living thing, not what sustains it. The chapter is not recommending weakness, and it does not say the hard thing loses. It says the hard thing is already on the other side of something.

Applied to bracing, that lands somewhere useful. Bracing works, briefly, and it is the correct response to a short shock. Held for months it becomes the posture itself — and the qualities that go first under it are the ones the situation most needs: being reachable, being able to be told things, being able to receive help, still being present to the person the situation is actually about.

From the Tao

The hard and the strong are the companions of death. The tender and the delicate are the companions of life. — Tao Te Ching, chapter 76 (Paul Carus, 1898)

What the Straining Costs

Chapter 50 approaches the same ground from a different angle, and one line in it does most of the work. Having divided people into those on the paths of life and of death, it adds a third group — those who are alive and yet moving into the realm of death — and gives the reason: "Because of their excessive strivings after life" (chapter 50, C. Spurgeon Medhurst, 1905).

That is a difficult sentence and worth sitting with, because it is not saying that wanting to live is a mistake. It is naming a specific failure mode: the straining after a thing can consume the thing it is straining after. Months spent entirely in the effort to secure an outcome are months that were also the life in question.

The chapter then offers its image of the person who is not doing this — one for whom the rhinoceros finds no place to thrust its horn, the tiger no place to fix its claws. It should be said plainly that this is an image and not a promise. Nobody is invulnerable, and reading it as a claim about physical safety makes the chapter say something foolish. What it points at is narrower: a great deal of what wounds a person in a long difficulty gets in through the grip itself, and that portion is not fixed by circumstance.

What This Does Not Say

Some limits, stated directly, because this is territory where vagueness does harm.

It does not say the situation is secretly fine, or that it happened for a reason, or that acceptance will improve the outcome. It makes no claim about outcomes at all. It does not counsel giving up on treatment, or on trying, or on hope — hope is not the same as the grip, though they are easy to confuse from the inside.

And it is not a substitute for people. A long unfixable situation asks for more hands than one person has, and the practical things — help with the driving, someone to take a night, a doctor asked a direct question, a professional when the weight has become more than can be carried alone — are not lesser than the contemplative ones. The chapters are describing how to be in it, not a reason to be in it by yourself.

A Smaller Thing to Try

Once, at the end of a day, separate the two lists. On one, what was actually done — the appointment, the meal, the hour sat with someone. On the other, what was solved.

The second list will usually be empty, and seeing it empty in writing is different from feeling it. The first list is generally longer than expected. The point is not consolation; it is that these were being scored against each other all day without either being looked at, and the scoring is what produces the sense of having failed at something.

Chapter 76 does not ask anyone to be soft about what is happening. It observes that staying tender is a property of the living, and that in a situation which will not be fixed, remaining reachable is not a lesser achievement than fixing. It is most of what is available, and it is not nothing.