Why Help is the Greatest Human Accelerator
Yet many of us have a weird relationship with help…why?
👋🏼 Hey, I’m Joanna! I’m a communications consultant sharing insights and ideas relating to democracy, wellbeing, AI, culture, spiritualism and the human condition…read on if this has piqued your interest.
“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.” – Muhammad Ali
Help is a word we know and feel when we feel worthy of accepting it and soulfully nourished when we offer it. Yet it’s a word given different shades of expression, possessing conflicting narratives and carrying an assortment of energy spectrums. To help – giving and receiving it – is to be human. So why do many people have a weird relationship with it?
I’ve been pondering the idea of help recently, and what it means in different contexts – self-help, help with a work project, helping a friend, receiving help from family. Help help help, we all want and need it at some point.
With the U.S Presidential election just around the corner I’ve been asking myself “How helpful is this candidate’s take/expression/information to me?” And “How often do they speak about help?” The word never springs out, for some reason.
“I think you all know that I've always felt the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.” – Ronald Regan, President’s News Conference, 1986.
These kinds of statements give help a bad name. It twists and distorts our understanding of help in such a way that it makes help seem like a negative thing to ask for and receive. Yet help is much more than a transaction – it is a state which showcases our human spirit and energy, the highest expression of care. And like any other thing we pay for, from our hair stylists to our mechanics, we expect a service of care. To govern is to be a public servant. This is why I’m puzzled by the lack of the world “help” in the U.S election. What else is government there for? Entertainment?
Help as a gift and energy, not as a financial or power transaction, makes us human. It liberates us from feeling alone and confronting concerns alone. Help is the antithesis to loneliness, as through helping someone, or someone helping you, you become the opposite of lonely – connected, content, and caring. It’s an energy generator, human accelerator and meaning-giver. The opposite is also true. To refuse help is to stay frozen, stuck and suspended. This applies on both sides, when giving and receiving help.
To help is to move our energy forward, the most vital thing we can do when we want to make progress.
So if we don’t help in some way, how do we accelerate forward as humans and as a society?
It goes without saying that there are limits placed on the amount that we can help or are available to help. A mother of five will have less capacity to help than a single man with a dog to care for.
Yet the busiest of people – think CEOs running billion-dollar companies, parents who run three businesses, the PHD student who sits on two committees, writes research papers, volunteers, has a social life whilst also cranking out 100,000 words for their PHDs - somehow always makes time to help. Why? Because they value it. They can see the forest from the trees, just as they remain attentive rather than distracted. They strive to do something useful that has impact that they can see, hear and feel. To be a helpful person is to be a superior one.
To help is to open your world to someone. This sounds radical when we are increasingly living inside our own personally curated worlds – think Spotify playlists, selected media, Netflix, social media – which may explain why so many of us look inwards via self-help. Yet if our eyes and senses are alert and open to the outside world and how it would benefit from our unique help, we will all feel that little bit more alert and alive.
Helping keeps our energy vibrant, our humanness intact. Helping is good for our health. It’s why social prescribing has boomed, confirming that giving and receiving help is good for the human condition.
To help is to heal someone with your presence.
Without helping others, we become devoid of the energy and spirit of life itself.
This is why offering help regenerates our energy, whilst receiving help regenerates our sense of value and worth.
And all of this impacts our aura.
Most of my most meaningful memories have been generated whilst helping others. Service is the circularity of life. We give, we receive, we give back again. Over and over. In different ways, to different people, over different circumstances. And each time it reflects back to us an aspect of our own humanity, character and soul that we otherwise wouldn’t have experienced unless we had helped someone else, someone who is not ourselves.
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Self-help is a form of self-wealth. A certain degree of self-help is always required to get us to become the person we are destined to become and be, the lessons gained through the process have been planted before we see and feel them. A tree needs to use the nutrients and soil that it has to grow. But it can’t grow unless it itself takes action.
Yet over-reliance on it can be detrimental when not receiving and giving help externally. Kirsten Powers powerfully writes about why Americans don't need 'self-help,' we need support, and the opposite should be emphasised – why we need support. Not only do we need support, but we also need to know how to ask for it, receive it and embrace it.
This is one of the reasons why people can often feel weird about help – they can’t feel the feeling of receiving help and can’t fully embrace it, the helpful solution and the person who gave it to them. This links, in part, from being vulnerable, something which can be difficult to do when how we live right now attempts to numb us down, distract us and detach us. To seek help in a self-help society seems somewhat wrong when in human reality it’s a totally normal thing to ask for and expect.
In a large and close-knit community, asking for help is second nature. Yet in smaller and looser communities, asking for help can feel like a big ask. Help is a rhythm, frequency and energy that we zone in and out of. The more we ask for it, receive it and give it back, the more comfortable we will be with it. We will also begin to perceive it differently.
I recall being on a bus in England a few years ago when at one stop a lady tried to buy a ticket with cash. On this bus, you could only pay with a credit card. Seeing that she was about to step off the bus because she couldn’t pay, I stepped forward and paid with my card. I don’t know why that woman was travelling on the bus that day, or if that journey made a significant difference in the grand scheme of things. But I do know that by stepping forward and paying her bus fare, she felt seen and helped. In similar situations (in fact very similar – the same thing happened to me in Spain when someone ended up paying for my ticket with cash as this was the only way to purchase a ticket. Note to self: always carry cash) being visible with help helps others to become helpful.
It’s also a form of active karma, something which we should be mindful of when we find ourselves in a moment where someone would benefit from our assistance. This could be from choosing to voice your admiration for someone for their talents, their character or values, to attending to the homeless person on the street by actively choosing to given them your time, attention and care. These moments are placed in our path for a reason. We shouldn’t second-guess them.
I’m going to conclude with how I began with a final thought on U.S politics in light of the election.
The foundations of America were built on “self-help” before it was given a name, but humans don’t prosper for long when acting alone. We know that the forces of loneliness can cause political instability and threaten democracy, but the question of what to do about it starts with us and our perception of others.
Everything is a mirror. It’s vital to stop and reflect on the direction and deeper undercurrent of what’s going on, and what this election is really about in its core essence.
Political chaos can’t live where connection, clarity and honest communication thrive. This is why I sense that the hidden message of the 2024 U.S Presidential is about help, how forthcoming it is, how it is distributed and shared, who it is given to and why.
How helpful is your response?
We could ask for help, but we often avoid it due to vulnerability, societal pressures, and fear of judgment. Your essay reminds me of the book "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse", where seeking help is shown as courageous and deeply human. Thanks, Joanna.
What has any UK government ever done to help we the people ? This question came up in a conversation with friends…the only example we came up with , is that we were a generation that benefitted from free degree level education. Governments do not help , they hinder .