Take What You Like (and leave the rest)

My physical therapist was prodding at my left hip, trying to come up with a more specialized diagnosis than, “You’re out of shape.” She suspected that my hip had become misaligned because of my bad right knee, which I had injured doing a postpartum workout eighteen months earlier.

“Your muscle is weak. Just because it’s tight doesn’t mean it’s strong,” she clarified.

By strengthening the surrounding muscles, she said, I could hope to eventually take pressure off my joints and get back to jogging three miles once a week, as I had done in my prime.

She did have one final suggestion: “Foam roll your IT bands every day, one minute per side. That’ll help your patella glide on the base of your femur the way it’s supposed to.”

I wanted to get my knee fixed up in time for an upcoming ski trip, so I religiously did all the exercises she prescribed for a week. They seemed to help. At least, I was able to make it down a few green slopes with my six-year-old niece.

I hated foam rolling my IT bands, though. I adored foam rolling my glutes, but doing my IT bands made me wince with pain. I never felt like I was doing it right and I didn’t get a sense of relief when I was done. As I suffered through this process in front of my sister one night, she told me that foam rolling your IT bands is bad for you.

Some poor unsuspecting lady about to crush her superior gluteal nerve.

“What? My physical therapist told me to do it!”

“Yeah. A lot of them say to do it. But the IT band is a ligament, not a muscle. Foam rolling doesn’t loosen it up, it just crunches the nerve that runs along it.”

I quickly found studies online confirming her claim. Foam rolling your IT band can indeed “cause extreme pain and can lead to injury.”

Who was right?? My therapist is very knowledgeable—surely she knows that the IT band is a ligament and not a muscle. I trust her. But the information online is gathered from multiple knowledgeable therapists, not just one. Was I lucky enough to get the one therapist who knows better than all the others combined?

Thus my dilemma: a trusted source tells me something that conflicts with another trusted source, and I don’t know what to believe. Or what to do.

When I attended my first twelve-step meeting several years ago, a nice lady who had been attending meetings for decades said something that blew my mind: “Take what you like and leave the rest.”

What? I thought. Isn’t that, like, relativism or something? What if there is something I NEED to hear but I don’t LIKE it?

Take what you like and leave the rest.

It means that, just because someone says something—even if they say it with authority and passion and detailed footnotes—doesn’t mean you have to take it to heart.

To some of you, this may sound like common sense. Of course people are free to think their own thoughts. Why would someone need to write a blog post explaining that? I am admittedly late to the party here.

To many of you, “Take what you like and leave the rest” may sound like relativism, as it did to me at first. Over time, I realized that I already didn’t accept things I didn’t like. It’s just that I had become extremely adept at convincing myself that it was because they were objectively wrong.

I felt an internal need to disprove anything someone said that I didn’t agree with. I would come up with counterexamples to their point, or worse, mentally criticize their character. I did not know I was allowed to not believe something just because I didn’t believe it.

I wish more people had affirmed earlier in my life that I can make good decisions. I can exercise discernment. I can be told something and think to myself, That doesn’t seem quite right.

So can you.

I’m not saying Ultimate Truth is up to each of us to decide. I’m saying we’re each responsible for what we believe. We can’t abdicate that responsibility to anyone else—not our pastors, not our podcasters, not even nice ladies in twelve-step meetings.

My physical therapist can’t get me back to running condition, no matter how much she knows about body mechanics. That’s up to me. I have to take responsibility for what’s working and what’s not, what discomfort I’m willing to put up with, and how much effort I put in. That would still be true even if I found an ancient clay tablet declaring for certain that foam rolling the IT band is good.

The absolute tsunami of information we are pummeled with every day has forced each of us to develop some sort of filter. One filter we tend to use is simple group alignment: if it’s from Allie Beth Stuckey, it’s correct; if it’s from the New York Times, it’s wrong. Or vice versa. (You know which way you swing.)

I don’t feel that approach is getting us any closer to Ultimate Truth.

It’s been immensely freeing for me, when I come across an article I don’t necessarily agree with, to think to myself, Take what you like and leave the rest. When something feels off, I don’t have to immediately push back and prove why it’s wrong. I also don’t have to force myself to accept it or understand it. But I almost always learn something.

Ultimate Truth has infinite tentacles. When we get in the habit of accepting what we can accept, that’s often enough to nudge us towards the bigger truths we weren’t quite ready for earlier. It’s more sustainable than trying to fake-believe something that just feels wrong.

This little hack works in all settings, not just news consumption. A conference, a sermon, a meeting, a conversation, a store, a restaurant, a book, a podcast…you name it. You can instantly free yourself from frustration and free others from your judgment by reminding yourself: Take what you like and leave the rest. I’ve been amazed at how much more nectar and how much less poison I get from the world.

Taking what you like doesn’t mean only accepting easy, comfortable things. Let’s bring it back to the physical therapy metaphor. There is a difference between productive discomfort (like strengthening a weak muscle) and unproductive pain (like crushing your superior gluteal nerve).

We can embrace the productive discomfort of hearing a new perspective and simultaneously reject the unproductive pain of watching videos with screamy yellow captions.

I wrote this whole piece mostly to say: please take this approach to the things I say. Like me, you have good reasons for your perspective. I’ll be just fine if you don’t agree with me, and so will you.

Take what you like and leave the rest.