COMMENTARY: In praise of workarounds

(RNS) Workarounds aren't a sad sagging of the spirit. They are the bold, can-do wisdom that that sees challenges not as betrayals but as obstacles to be surmounted. By Tom Ehrich.

(RNS) A long, long time ago, when basketball seemed paramount in my life, I injured a finger by persistently catching passes incorrectly. “Soft hands” weren't my gift. Now I cannot use that finger for touch-typing.

I developed a workaround: a speedy system of modified “hunt-and-peck,” which enables me to churn out several thousand words a day on a computer keyboard but does, I admit, leave me looking a bit “old school” when I work in public alongside touch typists.

Oh well. Output matters more than method, even if it involves a workaround.


Let's hear it for workarounds, for our determination to work, play, do, function, learn and give — even when something about us is flawed. Maybe we can fix the flaw, but maybe we can't. Maybe our eyesight, physical limitations or mental faculties are such that we can't do all things.

Workarounds are a form of not letting limitations rule. As the forever-young baby boom generation crosses from middle age to AARP-land, millions are entering the world of workarounds. Turns out, we can't have it all or do it all. So we rethink our retirement dreams, we look at work differently, we change our recreational interests, we accept a certain lumpiness of form.

These aren't defeats, unless we choose to see them that way. They are signs of maturity and wisdom.

Workarounds could be my generation's great gift to society. When we accept the need for workarounds, when we employ ingenuity and flexibility to develop them, and when we keep our eye on output instead of method, we express values that all healthy people and societies need to develop.

The heart of today's political paralysis, for example, is a refusal to accept workarounds. People quote ancient authorities as if they held a magical path to a perfection that we should be attaining. They scoff at compromise and ambiguity. They try to make “tolerance” a dirty word and refuse to work with those they deem inadequate or off track.

They seek simplistic solutions — an aspirin between a woman's knees as birth control — rather than allow room for doing what we can with what we have. Better to shut down government than to accept a certain lumpiness of form, they say.

This politics of no workarounds means staying trapped in that self-loathing which says, “If I can't be perfect, I can't be anything. I must be right, I must be in control.” Rallies and chants of “liberty or death” help them feel young and all-capable again.


Problem is: the only rational course forward requires compromise, seeing the world as it is, and embracing ambiguity. In short, we need a workaround.

No less trapped are the mega-rich, who, it turns out, get little joy from their wealth, but feel driven to cheat and grasp their way to more, as they chase goals that seem foolishly binary (all for me, none for you) and adolescent.

Workarounds aren't a sagging of the spirit. Rather, they represent the bold, can-do wisdom that built a railroad system that united a nation, that saw challenges not as betrayals but as obstacles to be surmounted, that innovated and invented by trial and error.

Workarounds sound a call for innovation, not a backward-looking quest for perfection. We still search for solutions, but that doesn't mean we need to be perfect, always right or ideologically consistent.

(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus” and founder of the Church Wellness Project. His website is www.morningwalkmedia.com. Follow Tom on Twitter @tomehrich.)

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