Leave well enough alone
by Bob on January 3, 2008
There was an old expression that my grandmother used to use often: "Leave well enough alone".
It's a shrewd piece of advice and yet very much a meditation.
It hardly espouses a status quo attitude in general, but asks us to think twice about shaking things up when they may already be tolerable. And also that by not leaving things as they presently are, we could make them worse by fiddling around trying to ostensibly make them better.
Murphy's Law comes to mind, wherein it says that things which can go wrong, will go wrong.
The meditation on the saying "leave well enough alone" has been one of a lifetime for me, always hearing the echoes of my grandmother saying it.
Frequently I have not heeded this advice, in the interest of making things a little bit better or improved, and everything fell apart. There is a sense of "over-optimisation" of situations as one can fall prey to in Engineering and Mathematics.
Another saying similar to it is "if it works, leave it alone".
Frequently, leaving well enough alone comes into play with medical condition, save but only the worst ones which do need attention. Usually the body seemingly has an uncanny way of healing itself. Actually, in the older model of medicine, as Lewis Thomas wrote about, it was a passive model, contradistinct to the modern aggressive technological model, and just comforting the patient whilst the body healed itself. Obviously, emergency battlefield surgery was a counter-example. But it worked as a general rule despite all admonitions to do something about an illness.
Part of the Hippocratic oath of physicians is "First, do no harm". This again ties in to the saying. Think hard before you possibly could make things worse.
It also is easily understood in inter-personal human relationships. Let things be. It will all resolve.
So the old adage has won the test of time.
Now if one could only apply it and stop scratching mosquito bites.