A reflective monologue exploring the emotional experience of helplessness as an intrinsic part of caring, caregiving, relationships, and personal growth. The speaker frames helplessness as a coexisting complement to kindness and commitment—an almost honorable, inevitable response when one genuinely wants to help amid life’s suffering, illness, and relational mismatch.
So one of the greatest paradoxes in life is each of our experience of helplessness. It seems that for anyone that wants to be of help in this world, that it's an absolute mandatory experience that we go through helplessness, that because we're living in a world where we have life and death, we have war, we have pain. And those of us that want to be helpful in supporting people that are dying or want to support people to have less pain, we're certainly going to need to experience the helplessness. And one of the great challenges that we go through is to see that helplessness is really a badge of honor, especially when we continue to have enough faith and trust and courage and perseverance to want to help those around us. And that mixture of I really want to help and be of support to the world, and oh, my goodness, it is such an impossible challenge to create transformation with any reliability and seeing that that resultant helplessness is the human byproduct of this deep desire that we carry in the very best parts of our soul. In working with people that are dying and sitting by their side and wanting to create a sense of ease or trust or peace or faith, and sensing in many of them a certain kind of helplessness, the body's failing. Many of the people that we've sat with, that I've sat with, didn't know where they were going, what the outcome was going to be. And so one of the things that was a sign of caring was I wanted to help them, but realized no pat solution was going to be satisfying. And so that left me in a state of helplessness and a desire to help. So it's like the helplessness and the kindness of were coexisting. And my experience is that that's just about as good as it gets, because the person that I'm sitting with knows that I'm with them, and that there is kind of like this prayer of wishing peace and trust and ease for them. And each of us, as we look at our love, relationships, and we wish for a greater love or greater ease or greater similarity in our partner, and they're not quite the same as we are, we're going to feel helpless. Maybe they want to communicate more or less, or they're more emotional or less emotional, or they have more faith or less faith, or they're more sexual or less sexual, we're going to have some feelings of helplessness. And if we want to stay positive and we want to try to be helpful to the relationship as a whole, then we're going to be in that perfect combination of I would really like to be helpful, to love you more. And of course, I recognize I'm going to also have to have some vulnerability and feelings of helplessness as well. Helplessness is truly an ally when we open our hearts and our souls at the same time.
