I am indebted to Patricia "Pat" Shelton and to Patricia "Patti"
Zentara who inspired this conversation.
If you argue that any difference between "helping" and "assisting" is
just semantics, then I suggest you
consider
it's not "just" semantics: it's all
semantics. All of it.
When I come in to assist, I've
given my word
(at least to myself, if not to everyone else as well) that I'm
whole and complete,
and that I'll interact with others that they're
whole and complete.
This requires I leave all my baggage at the door
(choosing
to assist, calls on me to be
whole and complete
like my
word,
like my
stand,
which requires I leave all my baggage at the door). And the great thing
about leaving all my baggage at the door, is it'll wait there so when
I'm done assisting I can retrieve it again if I really want
to ... or perhaps by then I'll have the
presence
and the street-smarts to
walk away
from it once and for all and never pick it up again.
I vividly recall coming in to assist on one occasion when I hadn't left
my baggage at the door, which is to
say
when I wasn't
being
my
word
to be
whole and complete,
and I wasn't interacting with others that they were
whole and complete.
And it showed - I
mean
man! you could tell: in that space, it reeked.
I stuck out like a sore thumb (even I knew that). The supervisor (who
was really an
angel
they'd cleverly disguised as the supervisor, something she may not have
even realized at the
time,
but which later I came to realize) took me aside and said with total
compassion "You know
Laurence,
you don't have to assist if you don't want to.". She knew.
I just
stood
there
looking
at what she'd just said, and then I went outside by myself into
the street
and
walked
around and
looked
at it a bit more, and I saw she was telling the
truth:
I did not have to assist if I didn't want to
... but ... if I was going to assist, I would
have to go back outside again (figuratively
speaking)
taking my baggage with me, and this
time
leave it at the door, then come back in again to assist without it. In
other
words
while assisting, I was confronting the
possibility
of
choosing
to not assist - and I wasn't only confronted by this
specific
incident
(whatever it was and whatever triggered it, I forget): I was confronted
by
my entire life.
Maybe it's
true
to
say
that if you've never confronted the possibility of
choosing
to not assist while you're assisting, then you don't
yet really know what it is to
freelychoose
to assist in the first place. Maybe.
In the space I was in, I could have
easilywalked away.
And had I
walked away
in that space, I would have never come back. But I did come back.
Something in
the way
that supervisor interacted with me (and thank
God
she did)
got
me to
see
I could
choose
to not assist if I didn't want to assist. And in the space of
seeing
I could
choose
to not assist, I saw I could reallychoose
to assist (that'sZen
for you) and I came back, this
time
leaving my baggage at the door.
That was about thirty eight years ago. I've been here ever since.
