“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” – Dr. Seuss

Last night as we were doing the bedtime routine, I started to change the gauze pad that was on my daughter’s knee from a scrape the day before. When we peeled it back, it was stuck to the scrape in the center. Any little jiggling of it caused her to howl with pain. As I weighed my options, I thought of the intro to MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely’s book, Predictably Irrational. He tells about his experience as a burn patient when he was in his late teens. He was there for a long time so he’d developed a warm relationship with the nurses. When it came to changing his bandages they’d say it was better to just go quickly to experience the intense pain of ripping the bandages off instead of the slow torture of an incremental peel. Well, Dan of course went off to become a celebrated behavioral economist and studied the question of ripping the band-aid off. Turns out, the pain isn’t any less for the patient – but it is less painful for the nurse.

I sat with that as I wanted so badly to rip off the gauze pad. And I thought of the many corollary experiences where I’ve done something similar – delivered the bad news abruptly because I needed to get it off my chest or severed a relationship without any discussion because I couldn’t stand the back and forth. It is a long standing pattern in my family not to say “no” to giving help when we don’t want to but instead make it so painful for the other person to ask that they never bother in the future. But robbing me of the assurance that I’m doing for the other person has made me think twice before proceeding.

So I left the gauze pad hanging off her knee and tucked her into bed. It filled me with self-doubt because as often is the case in the evenings when I’m tired, I have found my inner voice to be much more critical. In this case I worried that I was not helping my five-year-old face pain. This morning when she awoke, the pad had worked itself off in the night.  It turns out the lesson was that some times we can ride the flow to where we are going instead of pulling with force to get the same place. It’s something I’ve been working a lifetime to understand.