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Thank you for traveling with Charming My Life today, we hope you enjoy your flight.
No, I will not be passing out an in-flight snack.
Moving on…
Insight hides in the most mundane of places. Pre-flight safety instructions, for example. I admit, I rarely tune into the flight attendants’ spiel anymore. As the speech begins, so does my in-flight nap. Bring on the beverage cart. I’ve spent enough time in airports and on airplanes to consider myself adequately savvy in the safety department; but as I was considering this last night it occurred to me there are more useful elements within the standard flight deck diatribe than using my seat cushion as a flotation device in the event of a water landing somewhere between Phoenix, AZ and Denver, CO.
“If you are next to a small child or someone needing assistance, secure your own mask first, then assist the passenger next to you.”
People like to be helpful. Give us an opportunity and we’ll offer assistance. Perhaps because we’re genuinely nice people, or perhaps because we like the pat on the back and “thank you” we tend to get as a result. Who doesn’t like to be the hero? Even closer to our emotional centers is the question, “who wants to be the person that lets someone else down?” Our drive for that instantaneous personal validation is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. However, in our rush to make sure the people around us keep breathing we forget that we too need the oxygen. There’s a reason you put the mask on yourself first when on the airplane – the same reason you better make sure you’re emotionally belted in before you grab a hold of someone being tossed about. The best help we can often offer is to realize we need to step back and take care of ourselves for a moment first.
The fear of watching people we care about choke triggers a panic response, a panic that we attempt to resolve by throwing resources we have and resources we only wish we had at the issue. We feel better for a second, but what we attempt to do in that second compounds the issue as we commit to promises we can’t keep and write checks we can’t cash. I’m here to tell you, if I’m drowning I don’t care how loudly I’m screaming for you to help me, I would much rather have you turn and walk away to grab a life preserver than have you jump right in and drown alongside of me as we struggle. Trust me, I’ll scream for you in the moment but thank you later.
There are good intentions in those who offer help all of the time, good results from those who take the time to know when they actually can.
Thank you for your attention, please feel free to relax and move about the blog.
This blog post resonates with me. In my less self-aware past, I had a strong “rescuer” impulse … especially when it came to women. It took a long time for me to realize that:
a) Rescuing them was more about pumping me up than helping them; and
b) Helping them by “lending” them money, my car, food, etc. wasn’t really helping them.
Most people who need being rescued, I came to realize, are in that position because they put themselves there. They declined to be their own rescuers. (I know that sounds awfully Republican, and I know there are people out there who have been legitimately screwed over by the universe, but I think we all know the reality is 95 percent of us in a serious bind are there because of choices we made — or didn’t make.) As a result, they can’t really be helped because they’re not really looking for help. They’re looking to be enabled.
“Even closer to our emotional centers is the question, “who wants to be the person that lets someone else down?” Our drive for that instantaneous personal validation is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. However, in our rush to make sure the people around us keep breathing we forget that we too need the oxygen. ”
This truly gets to the heart of the matter. I’m sorry to say this is a lesson I had to learn very much the hard way. But I have learned it.
Be your own heroes, everybody. Be your own floatation device. Be your own safety mask. People who need people may be the luckiest people in the world … but there’s something to be said about people who need themselves just as much.
Wait!! You seem to be implying that I need oxygen. How mortal and boring.
Sure, my extremities are blue and have stopped functioning and I am slipping into unconsciousness – but there was a cry for help – and I am ….da da da daaaaaaa…. SUPER…..
….drowning…
****GASPPPPPP****
Hey??? We’re standing in the shallow end…
Jim: you made it all the way to the last sentence before you managed to squeak in a musical pop culture reference. I was momentarily alarmed that you had gone all Republican on me after all, because we all know Republicans have no sense of humor or musical tastes.
Political jibes aside (although I think I only managed to insult myself there), I deliberately left the word “enable” out of the post to see just how long it would take for it to show up in the comment section. Midway through the first comment, not bad. This must be why I hang out with copy editors.
Matthew: I’m suddenly inspired to throw you water wings, but I’ll resist the temptation in the interest of your own personal growth and I’ll go have a martini instead. You’ll thank me later. Really.
I recall growing up my grandmother used an expression “God helps those who help themselves”. To take that quote a step further, helping ourselves helps others. I would take it a step further still, ours is a symbiotic existence on this planet we must help ourselves to be any good at all to anyone else. Seems like simple survival logic, if I’m dead, physically, emotionally, spiritually there is no way on God’s green earth I’m going to save you.
Of course we live in a society that advances with glee on those who “selfishly succeed”. Oh sure we hold them up for a while but the media logic seems to be “if you really cared, you would put the mask on everyone in the plane first and then to show how attached to are to the cause, jump out of the plane in martyrdom”. Makes for a nice story and we can all hold hands and sing “we will over come” but from the practical standpoint of life kind of a dead end street.
Bill Gates is a great example of a man who put his mask on first and made a huge difference in the world. Now back when he was starting people were appalled he actually wanted to charge for his operating system, he was the new Satin of the programming world for even suggesting such an idea. I’m not here to do a biography review on Bill Gates but between him and Warren Buffet, another selfish guy, more will be done for global health than any government agency could altruistically put together in one hundred years.
Every day you get up and go to work, put your mask on first…it’s why capitalism works.