Teach Me to Care, Teach Me Not to Care
Part of a series on recombobulation.
Years ago, I was listening to an interview with Clarissa Pinkola Estes, a Jungian analyst who has also been deeply formed by her Catholic tradition.
Estes said that a Roman Catholic nun taught her a prayer: "Teach me to care, teach me not to care." This is a slight rephrasing* of a line from T. S. Eliot's prayer-poem "Ash Wednesday.”
But Ash Wednesday — the rites and worship service — originated in the Roman Catholic tradition, so perhaps Eliot was drawing on an even older prayer, for his poem.
Who knows?
In any case, I think it makes an excellent prayer.
Caring in the right amount, about the right things, at the right time, gives us the energy and motivation to act on what matters. Not caring about things that are distractions (or worse), allows us to let go of needless burdens and redirect our energies where they are needed.
If your experience is anything like mine, however, you wake up at 3:00 a.m. caring too much about things that are best left to resolve without your being a buttinsky. Or about things you cannot personally fix, at all.
At least, that is my experience.
***
I have cared too much about keeping up this blog and finishing my book draft; I have cared so much that it has made it hard to actually work on them. It’s been months since I’ve committed writing in public.
I have cared about the wrong things. I started this blog post several months ago. My files are littered with bits and pieces of this thing. The thought of publishing this post embarrasses me, because it seems too personal, and I care what (I think) people will think, and I care about how bad whatever I end up putting online may be.
And yet I know that such feelings are very common for writers. I go through cycles of caring and not caring what others think of my writing; and lately I have had page fright. I know that intellectually that it is impossible for me to read minds, to guess how others might respond. And I know that it is neither my business nor under my control how anybody else reacts, or if anyone else even reads it. So those are irrational things — stupid things, I tell myself — to care about. Right?
I do not want to care about any of this, and yet I still care.
I also care about getting my writing done. I have found that if I am not getting any writing done, my mental and physical health takes a hit: something in me — on the bodily level — cares very much that I keep writing and posting things, whatever the quality or lack thereof.
I really wish I didn’t care.
But because I do, in spite of myself, and in spite of all the better uses of my time my rational mind comes up with, I am writing this post. If you are reading this post, I’ve obviously published it, mostly so I can stop caring about it. Because then it is too late, it’s out there, I posted it; so then I’ll get an emotional hangover for a few days and after that I’ll care too much about whatever I’m writing next.
I would dearly love to control what I care about, but it seems that what I care about — and what I do not care about — works more like an inner landscape: The cliff edges and rivers and deserts of my caring and of my not caring precede my conscious mind and willpower.
I care about the natural world. I care about my country, and about the social fabric of my nation. I wish I either cared less or had more power to change things, because when you care about something but cannot control it, it means sorrow and grief when what you care about seems to be endangered.
And yet there’s the other side of that coin: when you care about something that you do not control, where its presence strikes a sense of joy. Or awe. I feel that sense of joy around wild things. Around the ocean. Almost any time I am on a boat. When I was a child and a young woman, I lived in some truly remote places: way up in the Colorado Rockies, and on the coast of Western Alaska (the mail plane came once a week, on Thursdays). I seek out the more-than-human world, when I care too much about the wrong things. At this time of year, I go out and look at all the bees buzzing around my purple asters in the back yard.
Oh, wait. That was last month. Page fright for yet another month. Okay, today I go out and look at the last leaves on the sugar maple that fills up our tiny front yard.
If I had published this last month, it would have been a picture of purple asters.
I do not care about a lot of things that others care about, but I tell myself I should care more about some of them. Sports, for example. Intellectually I can see the value of teamwork, and striving, and the human element, and appreciate that there’s an art to it, but emotionally I just do not care. I would like to care more about sports, because I care about a lot of people who care about sports. It would be fun to connect with them better over all that, but it is not in my emotional landscape. One of those desert areas for me.
I should possibly care more about theology than I do. Perhaps it is integrated for me by now, a settled thing, after so many books and classes. Perhaps I don’t have to care about it as much now as I once did; perhaps I had to care about it much more in the past, in order to be freed to care less about it now.
Also always there has been tension for me between arguments in books and my own lived spiritual sense. It is not such a tension that I cannot preach and teach my tradition, but at the same time it is a felt sense of the divine that feels most real to me, not so much an intellectual experience or a doctrinal thing. More of a gut thing than a head thing. Like knowing when to speak, and when to be quiet. (Another thing I care about, and struggle with.)
I’ve cared about many things that others find trivial or unimportant. Office supplies and filing things, for example. And I’ve cared about some people more than they have cared about me, and the reverse is true as well. The human condition, right?
I wish that I could control my caring and my not caring. But perhaps that is why this phrase makes such a fine prayer: “Teach me to care, teach me not to care.”
Perhaps there is something that knows better than I what wisdom and care look like, in the shaping of my life and in my interactions with the world.
Perhaps it is best I consider it none of my business.
***
For me personally, assuming I am otherwise taking reasonably good care of myself (taking walks outdoors, connecting with others, eating Not Doritos), prayer is my best mode for resolving this.
When I say “prayer,” what I mean specifically here is taking the thing that you are caring about so much or so little that it interferes with your life, and asking that which is wiser than your conscious mind, to take care of it instead; and simply clue you in when you need to act.
I think of this particular prayer — “teach me to care, teach me not to care” — as handing over the things that are worrying and gnawing on my conscious mind, to something that is larger and wilder and far more wise and creative, that knows in real time what to care about, what to dismiss, and what needs to be done, at the moment.
I call that “God,” but people call that source of wiser intelligence and guidance all kinds of things: intuition, a higher power, the ancestors, lots of names for it.
I really don’t care — really, I don’t — what you choose to call it. But it is real, and many many artists and writers and spiritually inclined people rely on it.
It matters less what you call it, I think, and more than you call on it when you find yourself confounded by how much or how little you care about something, whenever you find yourself thrown off balance.
And in my experience at least, it does respond. Not in words so much — though once when I was in a bad car accident I did hear brief, calm, audible words of reassurance; although I was alone in the car — but through the imagination, the intuition, gut feelings and a sense of inner prompts.
And working with it, following its lead, in some mysterious way, you have all the time you need, to get what is needed, done. And done in a relaxed, peaceful way.
It is very strange. Also really cool.
Sometimes when I remember to rely on this source of wiser intelligence — to call on it for help, and to listen for its responses — it feels like I’m traveling in an intentional river current that is carrying me to exactly where I need to be, to exactly the people and resources I need, to deal with what I, on my own, have been caring too much or too little about.
For me, personally, I am only able to get into this state, step into that river current, with prayer.
Whenever I turn to it, things untangle, sort themselves out, recombobulate themselves. Not on my timeline necessarily; but part of that prayer process, I think, is that one can be released from one’s expectations about the timeline, and trust that things will coalesce and happen when they need to, not when you think they should. Two entirely different things.
And the clue for me to hand things over to that wiser and wilder intelligence, is when I find myself feeling unbalanced because I do not know how to manage my caring and my not caring.
“Help, help! I’m stuck in my own swamps of caring! Help, help! I can’t find the exit from the asphalt lot of apathy! Teach me to care, teach me not to care!”
A fine prayer.
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References
* Eliot’s line: "Teach us to care and not to care"
“Ash Wednesday” - T. S. Eliot (posted 2015). Available at: https://www.best-poems.net/t_s_eliot/ash_wednesday.html (Accessed: 18 July 2025).