Givers and Takers

List everything you do.

Now list everything you do in which there is a live, dynamic connection of your true self with something or someone outside of you.

Now give yourself a big hug for surviving in a world whose preset is not nurturing to the human spirit.

Big News: We can't make it alone.

"Yeah, I know," you think.

But how does your life reflect that idea?

Does it mean that accepting help makes you a "Taker"? Let me explain.

I grew up the daughter of do-it-yourself parents. My father is an amazing fabricator. My mother is a gifted seamstress and whiz at all things house-holding. While holding a full-time factory job and raising my brother and I, they designed and personally built the country home into which we moved in the winter of 1986. Once there was spring thaw, our family painstakingly planted one thousand tiny pine seedlings into 5 of the 15 acres my parents had decided to convert from cornfield into homestead. There was electricity but no plumbing in the kitchen. The house was heated by wood my father searches out and hand harvests. Many summers were spent growing, canning, or freezing vegetables. In other words, hard work isn't just a catch phrase, it is a core belief going back generations of our family.

So I naturally believed that I can and should do everything that needs to be done. Oh, how wrong I was.

I think the pressure started to get to me right away that first winter. I had ongoing problems with stomachaches, and they started morphing into headaches around my sixth year. 25 years later, I'm still struggling with the need to do it "all by myself" and paying for it with nasty headaches and other chronic pain. It's only because of many hours of conversations with caring, intelligent people that I today recognize I need to lower my expectations and loosen my grip on my imagined obligations. The few things that must be done in life can be done on more flexible terms, without resentment, and in partnership. Dependence on strength from outside myself is the cornerstone of survival. I have much will, but it is not the unconquerable machine of accomplishment I once believed. When I am humble enough to share my life and my needs with others, they are blessed to bless me. This still short-circuits something in my hard-wiring, but when I can slow down enough to choose to override it consciously, I am always glad I reached out.

Maybe you, like I, believe that it's more blessed to give than to receive and this idea of being a "taker" flies in the face of being a "giver". Perhaps you would do well to reconsider. Frame it as a sponsor once did for me: I grow by giving. I cannot give to you unless you are willing to accept. You serve me by asking for help. If all the world were hands ready to feed but there were no hungry mouths, the hands would be useless. If all the world were hungry mouths, there would be a terrible clamor. But if there are hands and mouths, there are purposes for both. And there is no permanence in either role. To refuse to accept ones current position is to deny a great opportunity to grow.

Make a list of the times when you give by opening yourself to be helped, and you may find as I have, that they are also your times of greatest connection. This connected place is where you will thrive.

Now go give. (And take.)
-sk