The Continuum Between Help and Hurt

It’s tricky finding a balance between helping the people in your life and hurting them. You don’t think of it as trying to hurting them, of course. You think of it as striving for a better life: helping. But there is a continuum between help and hurt and its circular with hurt leading to helping and helping leading back to hurt. The two are inextricably linked because often, its been my experience, hurt is helpful. Captain Kirk was right about pain: he needed it. We all do. Even with physical pain there is often help underneath it (surgery, exercise). I’m not sure if all pain teaches. Maybe sometimes it just hurts. But I think the greatest lessons in my life have come from the greatest pains.

Anyway, now I think that we all make the happiness we feel we deserve. All of us. Sure, our circumstances matter to how easy it is to be happy, but they are obviously not the only factor. We’ve all heard examples of the person with some horrible physical limitation or illness who has found great happiness. Or the person who is poor who isn’t miserable. Likewise, we all know of people who seem to have it all from a physical sense but are miserable. We may not understand why but we aren’t really meant to. A person’s happiness seems to me to be an intensely personal thing.

No one can make another happy. We can help, but that’s not always an active thing. Or a quick one. Sometimes the best thing we can do to help is just to keep being ourselves. That’s because we all have parts of life figured out. I am blessed to know so many people who are so wise about so many things. Each has lessons to teach me that I try to learn. And I hope I have lessons for others as well. But I don’t think its my fate to know which parts of life I have figured out. I’m not sure anyone can really see that about themselves clearly. I suspect we can only see it in others. In fact I would argue that often, when I think I have something figured out, that’s when I am the most danger to those around me.  I have to remember that I can’t force my “wisdom” (if it even is wisdom) onto anyone else.

Ironic topic for a post.

Bottom line: my belief is that there is not one “true” path for everyone on this earth. We all have to find our own path to our best selves and the divine for ourselves.

What do you think?

People aren’t meant to know so much…

About each other. We were and are a herd species. I think we aren’t meant to know all the problems of the human race. But thanks to our news outlets we do. It’s too much to bear every day. It hurts us and cripples us. It makes us hurt ourselves with alcohol and food. Add that to the devil on our shoulder, the one who looks like all the cool kids (while the angel looks like a total dork) and all our dark, depressing parables where we add even more guilt to the mix, and its no wonder drug addiction and obesity are such a problem. I’d like to live somewhere with less cultural guilt, please. But without have to leave the United States.