Top of the evening everyone...
Interesting...where this entry is going, my mother would have quoted "Streetcar." "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." I prefer the Beatles.
I was having a conversation with someone who was finishing up shiva. She said to me that she had to learn to let other people be there for her. It is not something we do naturally.
When I had my appendix out this summer, it was the same challenge. Heck...I keep a Swiss army knife for just such occasions. The folks at the hospital gave me the choice of either walking or being walked from the emergency room up to the operating theatre. I was feeling lousy, but otherwise completely mobile. I almost decided to walk. I let them wheel me.
It was difficult to make the decision. It was easy to live with it.
Folks, we have all been raised to be independent. We have all been raised to be able to provide for ourselves. I think this is a mistake. Independence is wonderful, but it is not real. If we stop to think about it, we realize that we are interdependent. We need others. We need to be able to accept that others have roles to play in our lives. Sometimes those roles involve doing for us the things that we cannot do for ourselves. That means that we also have to admit that there are things that we cannot do for ourselves.
We are not lesser people for realizing that we have limits. We become better people when we allow others into our lives, allowing them to be the generous, selfless people that they were raised to be.
R/SCG
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