Every few months or so, I find myself randomly experiencing a revelation about myself. This has been going on for years. I'm tempted to say it's periodic but the periods are irregular. What it seems to be is serial-- one revelation at a time that drifts to my consciousness about myself and that gets tested and proven as I mull it over in my mind and observe myself in light of my new self-knowledge. Each revelation becomes a theme of the season until it gets absorbed into the makeup of my self-regard. In this way, I come to "know myself" more deeply, bit by bit, step by step, insight by insight.
You might think that after years and years of deep insightful illuminations into my psyche I would be a fortress of self-actualized self-knowledge. The funny thing is, more often than not these revelations of mine tend to have a way of knocking me down a peg or two. The revelations can be profound-- The expectations you have been setting for yourself all your life are unrealistic!-- or they can be trivial -- You shave all wrong! But they do all seem to point to failings and shortcomings that even I was unaware of in myself. Some of the revelations barely leave a mark -- You're a space cadet! You have absolutely no athletic talent!-- whereas others sting for weeks -- You're a slob! That last one hurt for a while because I had always assumed I had above average hygiene and taste. I realized in retrospect that the few weeks when I was on the cutting edge of fashion back in the 1980's were the result of my wife's little experiment in jazzing me up. I played along for a while-- wearing the outfits she had carefully selected for me and even letting one of her hairstyling friends experiment on my head with what are in retrospect hilariously fashion-victim results. When I drifted back to my natural slovenly state over time, my wife gave up on me, but my opinion of myself as a man of style and taste did not-- until decades later when I actually stopped and regarded myself in a men's room mirror at work and it hit me that the zhlubby stranger looking back at me was me.
This is all prelude to my purpose in writing today which is to share my latest revelation. You are eager to help yet you are singularly bad at helping! To be honest, in retrospect it's less than startling news. I dread being asked directions because while inside my head I know exactly where I am and how to get wherever I want to go, when I give directions, I never fail -- and I mean never-- to realize as my hapless victims have wandered away and are already well on their way along the path of chaos I have sent them, the essential detail I have gotten entirely backward or failed to impart that will steer them wrong in a way that will be difficult for them to recover from. This is a problem in a town that is a major tourist destination at all times of the year.
The revelation really has as much to do with the corollary to being bad at helping which is being eager to help. It's a reflex in me. I detect distress in someone, say a woman my mother's age looking quizzically at a metro turnstile from the outside, and I leap to their aid, for instance, proffering a tutorial on the mechanics of the contraption before them. Invariably an older person at the metro, particularly a person of apparently modest means has no need of a tutorial on the metro system. In fact, my injecting myself into the situation with "help" has complicated the achievement of the woman's modest goals as she has to pause from whatever momentary setback raised a cloud of confusion on her elderly mien the moment my consciousness chose to settle upon it in a state of alertness that was begging to see calamity where there was only mild consternation, to explain why my help is not needed. Most people being offered help from a kind, generous stranger will take pains to return the unsolicited kindness with politeness and an investment of themselves in their engagement with the helper. The upshot is that help being bestowed where it is not needed is a burden and a hindrance. Directed at an older person, it's the poor cousin of the con man's game: taking advantage of an older person's gentility and trust to completely waste their time. So the over-eagerness to help is itself a problem.
But the problem is compounded and protracted when help is needed and the help being given is not good. I've dropped groceries I was helping a stranger carry from a car to their stoop. I nearly killed a very old man who was wondering if he should risk taking a short-cut off of a high ledge by holding out my hand to help him down (someone else was fortunately there to guide him to safety). I once saw a ragged looking person sitting on the hot summer sidewalk, cup in hand as I was hurrying to get to an appointment. They didn't have to ask even once-- one look at them and my hand went reflexively to my pocket where it gathered my loose change (which I had an abundance of because it was in the days when I was not yet turned onto the notion of using a card for every transaction as a way of avoiding the accumulation of coins in the pocket). I released it all into the cup as I rushed past, too late to see what was already in it, until I heard the plop of solids hitting a liquid surface and felt a splash of ice water on my knuckles. The person was just as stunned as I was, which was too stunned to say anything. We were both shaking our heads as I continued on my way. So if you're that person reading this all these years later, please let me apologize.
These are typical examples of what happens when I am moved to "help" strangers-- not outliers. I don't have this issue with my work and my work product helps people, but it is planned, the plan is vetted, it is well resourced, it is tested, and I am given feedback and every opportunity to improve my work so that those who requested the help achieve maximum satisfaction. I am there to help and my help is actually helpful.
Is the crucial difference that my participation is not voluntary? Because I'd almost rather be doing anything else.
I have to wonder, how can there be a god in a world where a person so singularly terrible at helping is endowed with a zealousness to assist? I can't help but blame it on our current political and economic system. Hear me out: if our system were not designed to keep people poor and alienated from each othert, if jobs at a living wage were guaranteed, if housing were treated as a universal right, there would not be raggedy people sitting on sidewalks in need. If global warming were mitigated, such persons who remained on the street would not need to take time from begging to hydrate themselves. There would be no turnstiles hindering elderly subway riders, because public transportation would be free to all at best and certainly to the elderly at least. Grocery bags would still break at my touch, and I would need to learn to resist trying to help old people off of steep ledges, but perhaps thanks to mental health provisions under Medicare for All I could get the help I needed to make that possible.
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