Tag: helping

the do-gooders

The conversation around authenticity and being ‘self-made’ is always an interesting one to me, and the impetus for this thought today is from 2 very important events that I think we’re probably all tuned in to, which I’ll get to in a minute.

Nobody is self-made. Every last one of us has been shaped by experience and mentorship – some of those experiences are wonderful, and some of them are absolute shit.
Those of us who find ourselves in some of the crappiest situations we can imagine are there because of poor decision making, almost exclusively related to advice we’ve received, and trauma.
Similarly, many of the most successful of us have found ourselves there because of advice we’ve received, and trauma.

But whichever the case, we are guided and manipulated; like a shiny silver pinball being batted around a tilted table until we inevitably glide past our own limited control, and the game is over. Nobody wins at pinball… you just take longer to die than someone else, and then a bunch of people gather in a room and – metaphorically speaking – take a look at your scoreboard. Some people hold all-time records…

One of the highest scores of all time is Dolly Parton… despite a tragic upbringing and constant mocking and criticism at every turn in her life, managed to amass wealth to a degree that most of us will never reach, and did so by putting love and understanding ahead of her personal feelings.

Forbes estimates her value around $500,000,000.00 at a point where she’d purchased and donated 3.5 million books for parents to read to their children, countless fortunes given through charities, and created jobs for an innumerable quantity of people who; incidentally, she’d offered to pay for their college tuition and books for anyone who wanted to further their education. She; herself, never went to college.

She quite literally couldn’t give her money away fast enough to truly rid herself of it.

She’s an outlier in times of a Donald Trump presidency, who’s waged a trade war on Canada, which is an ongoing event that you don’t need to learn of from me when you can consult actual, credible news outlet… so all I will say is that he; too, has received trauma and followed bad advice in his life.

She’s an outlier in times of Elon Musk, a man who’s intent on colonizing Mars in an effort to get away from his family trauma and bad advisors.

I’ll end that list there, because I am not interested in discussing the motives of billionaires, other than to say that Dolly Parton would have been a billionaire if she hadn’t spent so much time giving money away, though a decent amount of her time was also spent writing, as she has more than 3000 songs with her name on them currently… which is probably a bit light, since copyright laws around creative works has a long, storied history of being shady.

I’m reminded of Fred Rogers in this moment, when he recounted an experience of about seeing calamity on the news and becoming visibly upset. His mother consoled him and said “Look for the helpers. any time something bad happens, you will always find people helping.“

To say that Dolly was a helper is a massive understatement, and there are obviously many accolades I’ve left out – but you’d be hard pressed to find someone who had something bad to say about her.

It’s easy to say that these are dark times, but I maintain that if you are looking for darkness, you will find it. So be sure to take a minute and “look for the helpers…“

Maybe even be a helper.
Seems we’re short on those.

As an aside, I received an amazing number of text messages and direct messages through social media within the first 10 minutes of the announcement that Dolly Parton had passed.

I didn’t know what to do with that information when I recieved it… and in retrospect, neither did any of the people who reached out to me. We all just needed to make sure that everyone knew that
The Queen is Dead. Long Live The Queen.

For the record, I was never a superfan of her music.
It was great, and authentic, and inspired generations of people to take the world on their own terms.

Personally, I just have a couple of her records, and a lot of respect.

suffering from righteousness

I don’t get into worldly politics on here much, and I’m not going to start now for the simple fact that these are subject far too broad and far too deep to chock up to left vs right. That said, I’m sure you can gather from the hippy-dippy undertones of what I like to write about, in tandem with my arts background, penchant for animal rights, and various other indicators that my preferences lie more on the side what’s best for the group rather than what’s best for the individual.

That said, we can all be greedy. Greed may be one of the few things you can really count on in this day & age, because when someone is greedy, they are somewhat predictable.

When a war is declared over resource… oil, for example – we can anticipate that the aggressor is going to be very careful in their attack, in an effort to not destroy what they are after. Therefor, there are safe places for vulnerable people to seek refuge – near the refineries and storage facilities, in this case. Once the prize has been won, the aggressor will leave, and the affected country will rebuild. It may not seem like it, but these sorts of engagements have rules, and breaking those rules has repercussions.

A holy war, however… a war based in some perceived moral superiority, wherein the aggressor seeks to impose a genocide on an entire group of people over a difference of faith is another thing entirely. No one is safe, and no care is taken – if the goal is to wipe an entire demographic off the face of the planet, then there is no calculable loss to be concerned with. This is true terror.

There are examples of both throughout the ages, and we tend to downplay our own historical misgivings while pointing the finger at others. Nobody alive remembers the Napoleonic Wars, or the Crusades – both of which were brutal and long, and both of which have been given names that sound a lot nicer than they would have been to experience, as opposed to… say; The Holocaust.

War is an extreme case though, isn’t it?

On a more granular level we have people we know, who are not really in powerful enough positions to exact war on anyone else, but there are haters and there are abusers, and scaled down, their motivations are the same… and we see low-level efforts of both all around us.

Right now we’re witnessing our own families and friend groups engage in a form of nationalism as we shop Canadian to avoid paying unnecessary taxes to an overreaching foreign government. This isn’t a thing we should do out of spite, but a thing we should do in the spirit of support – something we should have been doing before, but now we have stronger reasons to do so. But I believe that the cause of our motivation matters. It’s important to remember that there are people on the other side of that international border who are hurting, and that although we can’t necessarily do anything to alleviate that hurt, that is who is over there.

There is no moral superiority.
We have all the same bullshit here as they do there.
And while we’re concerned with what their government is doing – a government that we can’t vote for or against, and have no say over what they do – we have our own governing bodies, and we should be concerned with what they are doing while we’re distracted by what’s going on over the fence.

That goes for an even closer-to-home look at things, as well. there are people in my own family whom I completely disagree with as far as lifestyle, initiative, what decisions they’re making. It’s easy for me to label them – and I often do – and it’s easy for me to write them off – and I often do – but hate and exploitation are pretty far off in the distance from where I am right now.

If they were to actually put forth an effort into improving their situation, I would help them.

The only thing holding me back is the notion that I cannot do it for them… and to force my ideals of what should and shouldn’t be is no better than condemning them for not doing things my way.

I guess what we’re talking about here, is grace.

service and change

I; or rather, we, have recently been invited to help a family member take on a rather lofty challenge. A change in lifestyle, if I may be so vague – and as someone who has undergone a few changes in lifestyle over the years I can say with great certainty that there is always a blast-radius, and that there are ALWAYS people in the blast-radius.

Those people are often bewildered at the notion that someone might want to improve their situation and they almost always take it personally. This is because change is happening to them, even though it’s peripherally, they really don’t have a choice in the matter any more than the drinking buddies of an alcoholic in recovery would have a say in his or her recovery – though their social dynamic is changing.

These folks in the blast-radius are; in my experience, almost always operating at a lower vibration. Without putting too fine a point on it, they are the crabs in the bucket who are trying to pull someone down in order to keep that person at their level. I’ve been at the lower level, and I know what it looks and feels like. I even tried to pull people down, until one day I decided to escape the bucket myself.

So… I; or rather, we, have been called to service – and you’d be hard-pressed to find an ideology that doesn’t support the notion of helping when called.
And… straight-up: helping suuuucks. It’s ultimately thankless, hard work on the part of all supporters, with none of the glory or accolades when it goes well… so if that’s why anyone’s helping, they’re more than likely standing in the way of progress, whether they’re cheerleading or not.

This situation is no different. There are bewildered people in the blast-radius of this scene, and as hurt as they might be, I have to declare aloud that my act of service is not to them. Furthermore, I cannot take on their hurt feelings as my own. Those feelings are theirs to reckon with… and if I sugar-coat things for them, or try and soften the blow, then I do a disservice to the person who’s actually asked for help. As the old non-vegan 😦 saying goes… “If you want to make an omelet, you’ve got to crack a couple eggs.”

Did I mention this suuuucks?

Without divulging too much, I’ll also state that the folks in the blast-radius have been taking advantage of the person who’s asked for help – and I’m related to all of these people – BUT, that doesn’t change the dynamic.

You might get asked for help.
People on the periphery might get upset about it.
You cannot let them distract your from your purpose – which; in that moment, is to fulfil an act of service.

For me; or rather, us, it’s a scene that will play out over a long period of time, so I expect I’ll get more than one blog post out of it, too.