Help

This notion of asking for help has been popping up everywhere this week, it seems. R and I discussing whether to engage a wedding planner to help ease the stress of planning our wedding (as well as finding a travel agent to help us plan our honeymoon). My mother arranging hospice care for my grandmother (through which she also has access to a social worker to support her in this transition). A colleague reaching out for help with something she was preparing for the next day, because there was simply too much on her plate. A friend leaving me a voice note about how expansive it has been for her to reach out for help with her website, her nutrition, and myriad other aspects of her life.

In our individualistic, high-achieving Western society, we often shy away from asking for help, or even admitting we need it. Many of us have become ensnared in a narrative that the mark of a successful human being is the ability to juggle many balls at the same time, smoothly and gracefully. Asking for help can be perceived (at least by the one requesting it) as a sign of their own failure or inability to cope with life.

To help me get my head around the idea of help this week, I turned to David Whyte’s book Consolations. In his essay on this topic, he writes about two types of help: visible and invisible help. Recently, I have been much more proactive about reaching out for visible help – a cleaner, a wedding planner, a tax accountant, a handyman. While of course I can clean my own flat, research florists and caterers, fill out tax forms, and hang my own blinds (questionable on that last one), I feel such a sense of relief in my body and mind to know that I am supported in these tasks by people infinitely more capable than me. This is how the fabric of society is woven – by each of us contributing to the lives of others through our unique skills and gifts.

That leads us to the second type of help that David describes – invisible help, the help we do not yet know we need. These moments are harder for me to pinpoint, I suppose because I am not actively seeking them out or noticing them when they appear. I believe this type of help takes the form of conversations we did not know we needed to have (like a conversation I recently had with my coach that helped me re-orient how I engage with others at work), or acts of service from others that make a bigger difference to us than we realize (like when R cleaned the entire kitchen when I was on an evening phone call the other day). Invisible help, whether it takes the form of divine intervention, support from a loved one, or the kindness of a stranger, means that someone is paying close attention to us and anticipating our needs before we do. My favourite simple example, now that I think of it, is the story about someone who went around refilling expiring parking meters so that drivers wouldn’t get parking tickets.

This weekend, consider reflecting on your relationship with the idea of help. Perhaps you can ask for more visible help to reduce stress in your own life. Perhaps you can pay exquisite attention to someone else in your life and provide invisible help they didn’t know they needed. Either way, consider the transformation that may be possible when we give ourselves permission to be vulnerable enough to ask for help.

About Friday Pauses

We can all sense how a lack of presence in our daily life affects the quality of our relationships, our ability to form real connections – and yet we struggle to set aside distractions. In my Friday Pauses, I want to encourage us all to do just that – pause for a moment and feel what it’s like to be present by reading a poem.

If you’re new to Friday Pause, here’s what I suggest:

• Minimize or close other screens.
• Put your phone on silent.
• Close your eyes and take a full breath in…and out. Maybe count to four on the inhale and six on the exhale.
• Read the poem below – out loud, if you can. It will slow you down and help you feel the words more.
• Take another deep breath in…and out.
• Resume your day.