Of course you want to help.
Of course you want to relieve other people of their suffering and difficulty where you can.
But it’s easy to confuse what’s actually, genuinely of help with what makes you feel better.
In other words, it’s easy to do what makes you at ease and then take your ease as proof that you must be doing good.
But being of help does not and cannot always feel that way.
Genuine helping is an act of vulnerability and courage and openness towards another. It requires you to give up all your demands that things turn out or feel a particular way. And to give up needing a particular kind of response from the other person. In real difficulty, it might involve you giving up knowing, or pretending to know, what to do at all.
Confusion over this, and of course your wish that others not feel pain, can lead you down some queasy paths. You reassure a friend facing a possibly life-threatening illness that everything will be alright. You ask someone who is grieving if they are ok, when ‘ok’ is the word furthest from their experience.
In your attempts at kindness, you end up missing the other's simple deepest wish for connection: being seen and understood, their difficulty recognised for the suffering it is. Your kindness leaves them feeling more alone.
From speaking to others who have experience of this, and from an interlude of my own acute, frightening illness, it seems clear to me that the most compassionate and most helpful way you can speak to someone who is in difficulty of any kind is to first, simply, to ask them
“What is this like for you?”
And then listen. With every ounce of presence, openness and receptivity that you can muster. For as long as it takes for them to speak.
Allow yourself to hear something quite different from what you were hoping to hear.
And allow yourself to be changed by what they have to say.
We've believed that somewhere, at the top of the mountain we feel like we're climbing, everything will be alright at last. We'll be fulfilled, at peace, happy.And so everybody's climbing the mountain, and everybody else seems to be trying to sell us something that will get us there more quickly. 'Buy this product', the advertisements scream, 'and at last you'll be ok. At last you'll be able to rest'.So we climb, faster and faster, harder and harder, exhausting ourselves along the way. We're sure the answer is at the top. We tell ourselves, 'When I have that job, that house, a beautiful lover, children, money, fame, the right car, or body shape, or clothes, an advanced degree, my name on a book, when I retire, I'll be there'.And the climb becomes more frantic, more determined, because it seems that other people have reached the top of the mountain already. Film stars, celebrities, billionaires, models, TV presenters, novelist, the people in the next street with the nicer houses, your friends - many of them look like they have it together, that they at last have reached life's destination.There are books, and courses, and coaches and products that promise you all of this - that there's some secret to the climb that's right in front of you if only you'll buy it, some magical way to accelerate you to the top.And all the while, you're hardly in life at all. Always postponing, always deferring, and piling suffering upon suffering as you compare yourself with others who seem to be further ahead, living the life you should be having.But the mountain has no top.Each crest simply hides another, and the genuine, heartfelt relief that comes from reaching it is soon replaced by the understanding that you didn't arrive yet, that you have further to go. Gradually you realise that staking your life on reaching a peak that never existed isn't what you'd bargained for.Or - alternatively - you discover that you're already at the top of the mountain. And that you always have been.
So much of what seems so obviously true about other people is, if you look closely, a product of the particular way you see things. It might well be that your judgements arise precisely because of the categories you are insisting other people fit into.
Dramas - the stories you spin into being, which although perhaps painful and frustrating and fearful, place you right in the centre of the action.Dramas - all your stories of how people are not paying you due attention, seeing you in the way you want to be seen; all the ways you are left out, overlooked, your needs and wishes unnoticed and unmet; all the ways in which others are conspiring against you or, at least, taking care only of themselves; how the world seems organised to particularly frustrate your personal hopes, your longings.Dramas - perhaps unsurprisingly - are a powerful way of generating some sense of self-esteem in the midst of a world that's confusing, contradictory, and chaotic; a world far beyond our understanding which does not obviously attend to our particular needs and wishes as quickly or as completely as we would wish.Once we start to see that our dramas are not the way the world 'is' but a purposeful activity on our part to make ourselves feel better, or to get seen, or to manipulate others to get our needs met, perhaps we can begin to loosen our grip on them a little.Because by placing ourselves in the centre of the world, our dramas seriously reduce our capacity to respond to the needs and longings of others. And in this way our collective commitment to keeping our dramas going brings about exactly the self-centred world we fear is excluding us in the first place.
When was the last time you felt fiery and fierce about what you’re up to? Whole-heartedly and bodily swept up in work that matters deeply to you? Left feeling alive by your efforts?When did you last find that your work diminished you? Left you feeling less than whole, and less than fully human?And what, if anything, are you doing about what you’re concluding?
In the sometimes desperate, fearful shoving and striving of getting what you want, it's all too easy to find yourself in a life whose form is quite far from what is fulfilling, or alive, or meaningful, or that allows your unique contribution to come forward.You may even find that what you thought you wanted, that which you've been pursuing with so much effort, turns out to not be what you wanted at all.Perhaps you'll only notice then when you find out how far from yourself you are living.So as well as asking how to get what you want, and working towards that, you could also ask what kind of person you want to be. This is not a question many people are taking on with seriousness.And what could come if you pursued that with a sincerity, vigour, and dedication equal to your other projects?
The danger of expectations is that the value of an experience, a meeting, a project, a course, or a relationship collapses into something really quite shallow. Value becomes, simply, the extent to which your expectations were met, or not.By holding tightly onto expectations you are, before an event even happens, squeezing it into a frame that you've created. 'That day together was no good' may simply mean it didn't match the way you'd imagined it.Instead, how about entering into an experience or relationship with sincere intent? Orient yourself towards what you intend to bring, or a way you intend to be.When you bring yourself with a whole heart, with generosity, with the intention to contribute, or be true, or to listen deeply - without attachment to the outcome - you allow the experience or relationship to be what it is.And you give yourself and others the chance to discover that, surprisingly, what's genuinely of value often arrives in ways quite different from what you were expecting.