Help is Outside of Us: Delights of the Ordinary No. 41 (S2)
Get better at asking for help and be a better helper!
Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone. This newsletter intersects culture, art and our practical 9-5 job space.
"We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
- C.S. Lewis
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life,” writes Hemingway. And sometimes when I look in and around, I feel what a bedraggled life I am living. Writing from my unfancy white-walled 6x6 cove located somewhere in one of the tight lanes of Mumbai which is abundantly packed with people that it seems the city is bulging out of its seams!
From this scruffy city, I send you some unruffled comfy letters with some frenzied wild-wild hope that maybe someone needs euphonic delightful cheers and maybe someday recognise me as their long-distance helping friend.
This is my way to help!
Because, when help is around things may not suddenly become easy, they are surely made tender against life's stiff rigidity. I write to you with this longing, that my words may help you uncover the gaps, keeping you from mindless doom-scroll; in this sunlit summer, with your chilled sherbet or smoothie you read my brainy blobs and my rantings I send towards you.
The Power of Help
Nelson Mandela lived his twenty-seven years, tight shut in a jail in South Africa. He could have never thought that he would someday see the daylight and would become the first black president of South Africa.
In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela narrates his schedule in jail, “After inspection we would work in the courtyard hammering stones until noon. There were no breaks; if we slowed down, the warden would yell at us to speed up… After lunch we worked until 4, when the guards blew shrill whistles… we again received mealie pap porridge[for dinner], sometimes with the odd carrot or pieces of cabbage or beetroot thrown in -but one usually had to search for it. If we did get a vegetable, we would usually have the same one for weeks on end, until the carrots or cabbage were old and mouldy and we were thoroughly sick of them.”
Any variety of help in this sort of prison-life would feel like the sun spreading its comfy warm rays over the damp muggy walls of the rains. To Nelson Mandela, his friend was like these crisp warm sunny rays who had sent him books to read while he was in jail.
In return, Mandela wrote a Thank-you letter to Mr John Maud, a British civil servant and a diplomat, who made it possible to get him books in jail. He also wanted Maud to convey to his friend that he has now received those books.
(Below is the actual image of the letter written by Nelson Mandela to John Maud.)
Here is the transcript of the letter, in case it is hard for you to read the original handwriting of Mr Mandela -
“The Jail
Johannesburg
14th September 1962
Sir John Maud GCB, CBE
The British Embassy
No 6 The Street
Pretoria
Dear Sir,
I have received six books which were sent to me by a friend in England through your Embassy. I thank you for making it possible to receive them, and I should be grateful if you would kindly inform the friend, should you be in possession of his or her address, that I greatly appreciate this valuable present.
Yours faithfully,
N Mandela
NELSON MANDELA
AWAITING TRIAL PRISONER
13260/62”
There is help!
There is help and ample times it is outside of us. Helping others is an integral part of us. Not just a virtue. A 2011 study (Batson, 2011) states, “It is clear that helping is both part of our basic human biological nature and also in part learned through our social experiences with other people.”
Altruism is the term that is a sort of higher version of help. Altruism refers to any behavior that is designed to increase another person’s welfare, and particularly those actions that do not seem to provide a direct reward to the person who performs them.
Yet we shudder asking for help?
Asking for help is the first thing we learn to do after we’re born. Yet it also becomes one of the hardest things as we outgrow our milder childhood days into harsh adulting days.
In so many ways our culture keeps on shaming us if we are unable to do things that every other person is able to do - or pretends to do. Sometimes we are afraid to be declined if we ask for help. “One of the mindsets a lot of people have is that if they ask for help that they will be seen as incompetent or weak, and that they should be able to handle any problem themselves,” said Sophie. Sophie and her daughter Deborah are speakers, writers and authors on many topics related to mental health.
Furthermore our inner world is so much fed with self-help and self-reliance mantras, that the credentials to call out for help have simply faded inside us.
The truth is none of us can excel in all the things of the entire world. We need to fill in each other. We need to give what we have and humbly receive what others have. Sometimes, receiving a set of books like Mandela and in return we only have just kind gratitude and a thank you letter to give!
I think this is something we all experience when we receive unexpected and meaningful gifts — we want to pay it back, but there’s really nothing you can do to pay it back. So the next best thing is to pay it forward. And I guess that happened to me a lot as a kid.
- Dr Adam Grant, author of Give and Take.
Paying it Forward
Instead of being bloodthirsty and ruthless like in the movie The Wolf Of Wall Street, there is a scope of being nice and lovely towards people. Especially in our places of work. Somehow, our lives are rather different in and out of our jobs. We tend to turn into tight-fisted, traumatic bosses or employees in our office space cutting people’s ways to move forward without a thought of helping them.
Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist and a professor at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and he says, “This tendency to look for ways to improve the lives of others,… and enjoy that without expecting anything in return — which I think is at the heart of being a giver — is actually something that does not have to compromise your professional success. Just as you wouldn’t worry that you’re going to be a bad parent if you’re generous. Or you’re going to be a terrible community member if you care about the people who live near you. You can also be an extraordinarily successful professional if you demonstrate concern for the people that you work with.”
And hence, in case if you have lost somewhere in you the spectacular celebration of the human spirit and are caving into the devastating ways of this world and thinking that this standard slime is getting stouter, I nudge you to still believe in waking up to the corridors of flowers and warming rays of the sun, with generous helping hand when all we are gripped with is the landscape of ultra-concrete ways of defining a successful life.
Help is outside of us and it is inside of us too!
Roaming on internet brought two things to my soul this week, first, songs and second a poem. Sharing them with you :
To listen: How about listening the 2000 era Westlife on Spotify today? In someway the pieces then made the hearts dance and glee over their simple melodies. Something uncomplicated about the nature of songs during those days!
To Read:
Excerpt from In Praise Of Solid People by C. S. Lewis
Thank God that there are solid folk
Who water flowers and roll the lawn,
And sit and sew and talk and smoke,
And snore all through the summer dawn.
Who pass untroubled nights and days
Full-fed and sleepily content,
Rejoicing in each other’s praise,
Respectable and innocent.
Who feel the things that all men feel,
And think in well-worn grooves of thought,
Whose honest spirits never reel
Before man’s mystery, overwrought.
Yet not unfaithful nor unkind,
With work-day virtues surely staid,
Theirs is the sane and humble mind,
And dull affections undismayed.
O happy people! I have seen
No verse yet written in your praise,
And, truth to tell, the time has been
I would have scorned your easy ways.
Maybe in the warm hug of a friend, a listening ear of your mother, or in the stars or maybe in the creator of the stars, you may have happy helping folks around you. And you become one too.
Cheers,
- Anugrah
Delights of the Ordinary currently is a free publication. Yet it takes me many hours of effort to write and curate it. I may need lots of coffee to keep me going. You can
Who am I?
Hi, I am Anugrah. I write Delights of the Ordinary for us who are trapped in the world of hustle culture but are quiet at heart with an itching creative bone and love for life. My newsletter intersects culture, art, and inner health in our practical 9-5 job space. Feel free to share.
Stumbled on my publication? Explore all my previous editions here. And in case you don’t wish to spend time browsing then complement this post with Lessons from our Moms, To The Ordinary Woman or read about Decision Fatigue and Our Creative Life.
Yes! I have a health condition which means that I can't do things on my own from time to time. But my family growing up was always loathe to "bother' other people by asking for help for much of anything. "Figure it out" was our mantra.
I have had to learn to ask for help. And I'm no longer surprised how much people like to be able to help when it's well-defined and within their means (meaning their time and energy). It gives us a chance to make a warm connection and we both get what we need, maybe.