If you need assistance and someone offers to help you, accept the gesture
Had an epiphany this week and it came, of all places, in a Walmart near my hometown in rural Missouri.
As I was buying a whole bunch of stuff, the cashier asked me, “Do you need any help getting to the car with all that?”
As I always do, I said, “No I’ll be fine.”
Then, in a flash of insight, which is rare for me, I thought, of course I need help. I’m in this giant store with three shopping carts of food for extended family and many animals. I am shopping with a mother-in-law who is in one of those motorized carts because she can’t walk far.
I am with my wife who is using a wheelchair for this excursion because she is awaiting hip replacement surgery. I’m a senior citizen with multiple health issues including a back that is as curved as a mountain highway and as fragile as a kitten’s power of concentration.
Of course I needed help. I just said no out of habit. So the cashier promised to send someone. Naturally no one showed up. But I can only imagine how pathetic a group we must have looked, because a nice young woman from the nearby in-store hair salon rushed over and insisted on helping.
As in so many cases, it was easier for her to help us and caused a lot less bother than insisting on doing it ourselves. And it seemed to please her to be able to help.
I don’t know how many times I have been on the other trying to help someone who refused the offer but I know it is a lot. Someone who obviously needs help insists on going it alone and holds up everybody else when it would have been faster to have accepted help.
Does that sound like any relative you have? I understand. It is our nature to want to be independent. No one wants to be unable to help themselves. And it is hard to accept that our skills and physical and mental abilities have diminished.
But by insisting on denying yourself help so you won’t burden someone else, you actually burden them more. So, be helpful. Do nothing and take the help. I know I am going to try to do better.