Offering Assistance

Dearest Rachel –

I honestly didn’t know whether I’d have time to get in touch with you today. Oh, I’ll have hours in which I’ll be doing nothing but sitting in the passenger seat of a U-Haul bound for your hometown, but I think that may serve a purpose in its own right, which deserves more attention than me just staring at and typing into my phone. I’m there as a companion for Kerstin as she drives through those empty hours and flat plains between here and there, and I ought to take that duty seriously, be it providing conversation or just a listening ear. So I expected to be occupied such that putting together a cohesive essay to you would be somewhat difficult, if not impossible, in the time available to me; indeed, I wasn’t sure that there word be time available to me at all, once we were on the road, and later down there actually working on moving Ellen’s mom’s stuff.

What I didn’t expect was to wake up this morning before five; too soon even to head to the gym (which doesn’t open until six on the weekends). To be sure, it’s part of the whole cycle of “early to bed, early to rise” I told you about yesterday, but it’s bizarre to experience it to such an extent – especially when it actually manages to help me get some stuff done that I didn’t think was going to be possible; including trying to get an appropriate illustration for the weekend’s activity:

I woke up with the idea of “reaching out to help someone up” in my head – not so much a dream as much as a mere concept – and, as with this letter in its own right, didn’t expect to have time to try and get the computer up and running with sufficient time to generate these pictures, especially given that there would be plenty of obvious failures to discard, be it ones that didn’t quite convey what I was visualizing, or just plain out body horror.

Understand that none of these quite match the image (or rather, the series of images) in my head as I woke up this morning, but that’s okay, since they, like these, rather overstate (and, at the same time, understate) the need at hand. It’s not like Ellen’s mom has “fallen and can’t get up,” like those old LifeAlert ads used to go – although I understand she has had moments like that, which is part of the reason Ellen is trying to bring her up in any event – and we’re not extending emergency services to her (not that we’d be qualified to do so if we had to). At the same time, this is going to involve a bit more time and effort than just extending a hand and pulling her up off the ground, too. But it needs to be done.

It’s all part of the human experiences, I suppose. For all that some of us try to do as much as we can by ourselves (often because we feel we can’t count on others to help, due to incapacity or scheduling or what-have-you), there comes a point where that’s just not possible; we need other people to help us do what we can’t, because we, too, have limited capacity or time ourselves. The job is bigger than we are, or needs to be done in less time than it will take us on our own. As a result, we have to call on others to help out.

And with that being said, knowing that such a day will come for us, we ought to be willing to do the same for others. I’ve mentioned before that, as Christians, we don’t explicitly believe in the concept of karma, but at the same time, there’s a similar implication embedded in the Golden Rule as promulgated by Jesus himself – which, granted, exists in many different religions, but usually in the negative; “don’t do unto others that which you would not have done unto yourself.” Jesus’ version is distinct from most of them insofar as it’s proactive and affirmative “do unto others as you would have done unto yourself.” Again, there’s no explicit promise involved, but the suggestion is there that, if you extend assistance to others, they will be that much more willing to help you out when you need it in turn.

Granted, we can’t be doing things with the expectation of being paid back. In most cases, the person we help simply won’t have the ability to do so; that’s why we’re to be there to help them, after all. Nor is there any explicit guarantee that the universe will somehow pay your assistance back; or if it does, that you’ll be able to make the connection between your action and the ‘return,’ as such.

But that’s the point; whatever we do to help someone else –be it moving their stuff halfway across the state, helping them off the ground, or just sitting and listening to them every now and again – ought to be done without bothering with any sort of quid-pro-quo motivation; otherwise, it doesn’t really count as ‘goodness,’ now, does it? Besides, in the eternal scheme of things, these things tend to even out over time; this is just giving it our little push towards that. You understood the need for it, in your time.

But now, I guess it’s my time to offer assistance, so while I’m at it, keep an eye on me, and wish me luck. I’m going to need it.