Closer to fine: Trust your gut
(This is a repost from early 2021. My inspiration for sharing this again was hearing this song LIVE in Peoria earlier this week. The message stays the same: we don’t always need to know the “why’s” and it’s OK to not always feel OK.
Thank you Amy and Emily for sharing your talent and passion.
Thank you S.B. and family for your friendship, joining us for a fantastic musical evening, and for sharing your wisdom regarding middle school track team logistics.
I’d also like to note that I thoroughly embarrassed my kids at this concert by singing and dancing)
I was in the 8th or 9th grade when I first started listening to the Indigo Girls. There was something about their harmonies and lyrics that drew me in, even if I didn’t fully understand the meanings of their different songs. They’re still one of my favorite groups and I listen to them often; their older songs bring a sense of comfort, familiarity and nostalgia and their new songs a sense of excitement and intrigue as I investigate the meanings behind them.
One of their most iconic songs, Closer to Fine, has the chorus lyric, “The less I seek my source for some definitive, the closer I am to fine.” An article from Stereogum interpreted this lyric as “a testament to the spiritual notion that we each have all the truth and wisdom we need right here inside of us and, the more we look for it outside ourselves, the further we get from it.”
This interpretation embodies one of the basic tenets of health and wellness coaching: each client is the expert in themselves. The coach doesn’t need to tell the client what to do; the client knows how to move forward but might need the coach to prompt and help them discover what’s deep inside. Another way to look at this is trusting your gut. When my first child was born, I tried to read a few books on sleep training. Every time I went against my gut and followed what an expert (who didn’t know my child, my family or our circumstances) recommended, everything seemed to go to hell. Things went much smoother when I followed my instincts and was true to myself.
I’m going to take some liberty and share another interpretation of that line, because after all, music is art and as such is open to multiple meanings. I’m going to remove the spiritual component of the line and change the word “definitive” to “answers.” Of course, this wouldn’t flow as well in the song but the meaning is similar: the less I seek answers, the closer I am to fine.
Sometimes my clients get caught up in wanting to know the “whys” of the situations - why this happened or why they reacted a certain way. So much time can be spent trying to figure out the whys without getting any closer to the answers. Also, focusing on the whys can prevent them from moving forward. Letting go of figuring out the whys and learning to accept things for how they are (for now) allows the freedom to create a life that better matches one’s values and truth. Because let’s face it: we’re human and life is complex and full of unknowns.
Knowing the answers oftentimes doesn’t change the situation…or us, for that matter. One might argue that they could provide insights into ways to prevent similar situations but answers alone don’t give us clues as to what to do next. I believe looking within and building on the internal foundations we all have does the same thing more effectively. Doing so gives us the opportunity to build skills to face future challenges, secure in who we are. One of the things I hope my clients learn from working with me is how to be comfortable being uncomfortable and not having all the answers, because, well, “it’s only life after all, yeah.”
Check them out on Ellen promoting their latest album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7Mlod1jtsc
