Tag: helpfulness

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Into the Depths

Some journeys call for a special kind of hero.

One doesn’t just walk into Mordor … without a pair of brave and compassionate hobbits, anyway. Going to Oz calls for some Kansas common sense. And if you’re going where no man has gone before, it helps to have some Enterprising people along.

But all those pale before the adventure that starts with one simple question:

“Missy, where did the stuff I just had on the table go?”

And so begins the Plunge Into Missy’s Purse.

If you’re a long-time reader here, you may already be shuddering. For the newcomers: Missy, our developmentally-disabled ward, goes nowhere without her purse. (Trust me, it would be easier to separate Indiana Jones from his whip.)  Like a Joseph Campbell hero, it has had a thousand faces over the years, ranging from a tiny satchel to an oversized beach bag.

But a few things remain constant. They’re almost always red. They usually have a working shoulder strap (for a while). And they attract everything nearby like a miniature black hole.

So when something I’d left out for a visitor abruptly vanished between one moment and the next – well, it didn’t take Lieutenant Columbo, right? Especially since Missy the Everlastingly Curious had already been interrupted while trying to send it to Purseland earlier.

“Honey, can I have that for a second?”

And so began a quest worthy of Don Quixote … or at least Oscar the Grouch.  Patient exploration unveiled:

  • Two stuffed animals (among the few things to ever escape the Purse Event Horizon for brief periods)
  • Cards from at least three different games
  • The cover of a Random House book – just the cover, mind you.
  • Papers and programs from a dozen different activities.
  • A pocketbook and two plastic bags filled to bursting with random items of their own.
  • The Ark of the Covenant, a lost Shakespeare play, two turtledoves and a partridge in a pear tree.

You get the idea. Just about anything and everything was there for the finding it seemed … except the thing we were looking for.  But there didn’t seem to be anywhere else for it to go, at least not in this corner of the space-time continuum.

Except …

“Scotty?” my wife Heather asked. “What about my purse?”

Bingo. Prevented from using her own Satchel of Many Things, Missy had decided to be helpful and leave it for Heather. Without telling anyone, of course. (Maybe we should have called the Lieutenant after all.)

I had to chuckle. Every quest, of course, has to include a valuable lesson. And this was one that I’d seen in the larger world more than once – namely, that “help” sometimes isn’t.

So many of us are quick to help a person or a problem and that’s wonderful. But sometimes we’re too quick – we don’t stop to think about what the situation actually needs. At best, that can mean a lot of wasted effort, like the folks who self-mobilize at a disaster against instructions. At worst, it can even be actively harmful.

It helps to start with what I didn’t do … examine assumptions. By asking, listening and thinking ahead, we can be the help that’s welcomed instead of one more distraction.

It sounds simple. It is simple. And if more of us keep it in mind, it can make any task a lot easier.

In fact, you might even say it’s in the bag.  

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Small Wonders

As our family watched “The Fellowship of the Ring” together, Boromir lifted up the small golden chain that held the Ring and marveled at it.

“It is a strange fate,” he mused, “that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing. Such a little thing.”

In the film, of course, those words are an early hint that Boromir is beginning to become entranced by the Ring’s cursed power and that yet again, a character played by Sean Bean is not going to come to a good end. But this time around, the words hit me a little harder.

Maybe because this time around, we’ve seen the danger and life-altering transformation that small things can bring.

A reminder came just a few days ago from Kit Yates, a mathematics expert at Baths University in the United Kingdom. According to Reuters, Yates calculated that all the COVID-19 virus that currently exists in the world could fit inside a can of cola.

No joke – it’s the real thing.

“It’s astonishing to think that all the trouble, the disruption, the hardship and the loss of life that has resulted over the last year could constitute just a few mouthfuls,” Yates said in a statement.

Think about it. Nearly 2.4 million deaths worldwide (as of Saturday). Populations wearing masks, quarantining, keeping their distance. The very way we live, learn and do business utterly transformed. All of it packed into a space that would make the world’s worst Coke.

It sounds impossible. But most of us know the reality. As the great philosopher Yoda once put it, size matters not.

A single nail in the wrong place can bring a two-ton automobile to a stop.

A single tweet at the wrong time can set a nation aflame.

A single sentence with the wrong intent can end a relationship that’s lasted years. Decades.

A strange fate indeed. But as the saying goes, it’s the little things that’ll get you.

And lately the consequences seem to come with lightning speed.

That’s not an argument to live lives of timidity, sitting motionless and silent in the living room lest we say or do anything wrong. But it is a useful reminder to be aware that what we say or do has effects beyond ourselves, and that preventing trouble is a lot easier than fixing it.

That’s why we take cars in for maintenance. It’s why we treat other people with courtesy and respect (or should). It’s why we wear masks and wash hands and look out for our neighbors.

Sure, sometimes it’s frustrating. Sometimes we just want to cast it all aside and do whatever comes in our mind. Most of the time we hold it in, because we know we’re not the only ones who could get hurt.

But there’s another side to it that’s worth remembering. It’s not just the bad things that echo.

Good things add up, too.

They don’t get as much play. But I can still remember every unexpected gift from a neighbor. Every helping hand from a relative. Every stranger who stepped off the sidewalk to make room because Missy’s wheelchair couldn’t social distance. And each act living in my memory helps give me more encouragement to do the same.

When we reach out, when we heal, when we defend from the wrongs of others – it makes a difference. To others. To ourselves.

It takes longer to resonate, of course. It always takes more time to build than it does to destroy. But if we look to help where we can, when we can, as we can and keep doing it … that persistence can also change the world.

Avoid harm. Build help. It seems like such a simple thing, doesn’t it? Such a little thing.

But together, we can make it go viral.

And when we do, I’ll bring some Coke to celebrate.

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In Good Hands

Years ago, my wife Heather referred to an omni-competent physician as a “Swiss Army Doctor” – the sort who seemed to be good at everything, whether they were part of his specialty or not.

She ought to know. Because Heather is one heck of a Swiss Army Person.

She’s a fearless driver who’s undismayed by Denver traffic.

She’s an aunt who speaks fluent Child, winning the immediate trust and understanding of anyone under 10 years old. (Yeah, she was going to be a teacher at one time.)

She’s a patient who’s done everything from diagnosing her own conditions before her doctors did, to fixing her own IV when it threatened to come loose after a home infusion.

Lifehacks? Minor repairs? Odd bits of knowledge? Never bet against the mind of a woman who’s read War and Peace cover-to-cover and is ready to start again.

In short, she’s the kind of person that everyone knows they can rely on. And that’s the trouble.

Because Heather has also been chronically ill most of her life – Crohn’s disease, ankylosing spondylitis, and most recently, multiple sclerosis. And that means two things.

One, it means that life can get very frustrating for her, when something she should be able to do suddenly becomes difficult – say, because of the balance issues that MS can bring, or the “brain fog” that can even make reading a trial at times.

But the second is more subtle. Heather needs to sometimes not be needed. To just be sick, and have everyone else carry the weight for a while.

That’s all too easy to forget. Embarrassingly easy, in fact.

And the truth is, most of us have been in similar situations.

Sometimes it’s on the personal level – the parent, or neighbor, or colleague, who can seemingly do it all, and thus often gets asked to. Whose hands keep getting filled, even when there’s no room left to grip. If none of it gets passed on, something is going to slip. Probably several somethings.

Sometimes, it’s on the institutional level – services and agencies and organizations that you’ve come to rely on, whether local, federal, or in between. You assume things will go on as they always have, and so they do … until the day that there’s a new person in charge, a new policy in place, a new mandate from higher up. Suddenly the secure becomes scary. Suddenly things you never thought could happen are becoming the new normal, while things you could trust are no longer certain.

In both cases, the panic usually comes when a crisis hits – and at that point, a lot of damage has already been done. That’s when you’re scrambling, trying to patch the holes, grab the tasks, juggle the flaming chainsaws that are already in the air. And sometimes that’s unavoidable – but only sometimes.

Most times, the needs and the dangers can be seen far ahead. But seeing them requires attention. Understanding. A willingness to work before there’s a need.

It means anticipating when a loved one might be overwhelmed, and taking the initiative to relieve the pressure.

It means having a plan before the roof leaks or the furnace dies.

It means doing more than vote, but being engaged and involved in the political process before it comes down to casting ballots.

Sure, it’s not always possible. No one can do everything they need to do – and that’s the point. If we all look out for each other, if we all stay alert to jump in where we can, then we can make the ride easier for all of us. We’ve seen this in times as dramatic as the 2013 flood and as quiet as a family’s mourning – when we stand together, we’re stronger. We’re family, neighbors, community.

We all remember that less than we should. Myself included. So here’s the reminder.

Be there. Do what needs doing.

And let the hardest-working hands get some rest at last.

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Piling On

In The Naked Gun, there’s a wonderful scene where the bad guy has just been zapped by a dart from the hero, Lt. Frank Drebin. “He’ll be all right,” Drebin says, and he would have been –  if the bad guy didn’t proceed to then fall several stories onto the freeway and get run over by a bus. And a steamroller. And a marching band playing “Louie, Louie.”

Some weeks, there’s just no way to win.

This week, to be honest, has been a Louie, Louie week.

It started with a Saturday bug. It had to be Saturday, of course, since that was the one day guaranteed to shorten a Missy outing. With apologies, I took her home from lunch and sought the couch.

The couch and I then became close friends as “bug” turned to “cold” turned to a five-day-long “flu.” All the while, my lungs were turning into the cannons from the 1812 Overture, my body was shaking like a chicken that had been asked to cross I-25, and my sense of time was becoming about as reliable as a soap opera’s – lots of fade-ins and fade-outs, with the occasional flashback.

My first day of true recovery was met with ice everywhere, because there’s nothing that helps you bounce back from the flu like hastily clearing your car’s windshield in sub-freezing weather.

But the ever-helpful universe made sure that didn’t matter anyway. After one patch of icy road during a lunch break, I no longer had a car. No injuries, it’s true (thank heaven), but no transportation either.

As I listened for the sound of a marching band in the distance, I wondered if it was possible to take a week back for a refund. (If nothing else, I had a chance to beat the Super Bowl rush.)

What can you do?

We’ve all been there – the days and weeks when it seems like the world is personally out to get you. You know the thought is ridiculous, but as events accumulate like snowflakes in a blizzard, it stops mattering whether it’s purposeful or not. You just want the blessed train to stop, already.

And maybe a blizzard isn’t the worst comparison I could think of. Or a flood, or a fire, or some similar wide-scale natural disaster. Not because of the devastation it leaves. But because of the dependency it creates.

When a disaster gets extreme enough, you realize how many friends you really have.

When a week starts tipping over like a pile of dominoes, you realize how many co-workers stand ready to lend a hand. How many friends are willing to offer a ride. How many people are thinking of you and trying to come up with ways to make something better, even just a little, so that life can become normal again. (Particularly your long-suffering wife who’s watching the pile-up from the sidelines and figuring out how to extricate the survivors.)

That’s huge.

More than huge – that’s the definition of “friend.” And even “neighbor.”

It’s easier to forget that than it should be, in a world where “friends” are a way of keeping score on Facebook and social media seems to reward social discord. Those same channels can bring people together in common purpose, of course – few tools are so poor as to have only one edge – but it’s easy to get cynical and think that “neighbors” went out with Mister Rogers.

Until you get reminded otherwise. And reminded. And reminded.

That’s the best kind of parade.

So thank you, everyone. Now and in the future. As the good lieutenant says, I’ll be all right.

Just help me keep an eye on that freeway. It’s a long way down.

And you never do quite get “Louie, Louie” out of your head.