Knotted Together
Relying on others is not easy, but asking for help is an opportunity to consider our own self worth, build stronger ties with others, and create the resilient, interconnected world we hope for.
I have been planting seeds that will eventually fill the my garden beds with beauty and deliciousness but right now they are little sprouts on a shelf in my living room. I planted 100 tomato seeds, hoping to put 40-50 plants in my garden and share the rest. If I have too many I will leave them by the curb for anyone who wants to find a place to plant them in their soil. In her essay, The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer points out, “In this time when the economies have grown so large and impersonal that they extinguish rather than nurture community well-being, perhaps we should consider other ways to organize the exchange of goods and services which constitute an economy.”
Our society that glorifies the rugged individual forging their way towards wealth and power has pushed all of us to be more self reliant. We can go it alone if we have money to purchase our needs. Many believe that if you don’t have money to buy what you need it is probably your fault and you are doing something wrong. When we ask for help we often feel needy, demanding, or that we are inconveniencing someone with our request. But when we continually avoid the vulnerability of asking for help, we miss opportunities to create points of connection that could, with time and effort, become a sturdy net. In the gift economy that Robin Wall Kimmerer experiences as she picks serviceberries, “wealth and security come from the quality of your relationships, not from the illusion of self-sufficiency.”
When I think of offering help to friends, family, and neighbors, I don’t hesitate for long. Being a person in the world means, to me, that I help other people. It is an obligation that I signed up for by being in these relationships. I don’t do everything and I don’t always do it well; there are times when I feel reluctant to help, even though it is important to me. Helping each other doesn’t mean that we must learn to be more generous or less selfish, but we may need to isolate less and rethink the pervasive idea that self-reliance is morally superior to needing help.
Most of the time, I find it easy to offer help in response to a need or request or because I want to make someone’s life a little easier. Asking for help is so much more challenging, though. Kimmerer writes about picking serviceberries that grow free and abundant, a gift from the land ready for anyone who wants to pick and eat them without any calculations of what she calls “the mathematics of worthiness.” When we ask for help (and often when we give it) it can be too easy to fall into adding and subtracting the give and take, trying to figure out who is worthy.
As a parent I spend a lot of time helping my kids. Even though they are always becoming more competent, I frequently wish they would ask for help less and do it themselves more. Humans didn’t evolve to live without extended family, a larger community, or strings of connections that might make it easier to meet our own needs while supporting our children. So it makes sense that many of us fall under the pervasive idea that good parents should have well behaved, self-sufficient children.
But, while we urge our kids to be independent and try to teach them to do it on their own, we are often simultaneously pleading with them to help us more. It can be easy to feel frustrated when they need to be unique individuals with their own thoughts and ideas who are happy to say no when we really wish they would just, for once, say yes. We want them to be as independent as possible but at the same time we wish they could be more compliant. Growing up under these expectations, it’s no wonder that so many adults feel bad asking for help and guilty saying no.
Our kids will get plenty of messages about becoming rugged individuals, but learning how to ask for help, to find resources, and to relate to others through interdependence will allow them to tie together knots in the net that can connect and support them and the world beyond. In her newsletter, Mom Spreading, Sarah Wheeler writes, “I would argue that… dependence may be the skill our kids need to learn the most right now. How to ask for what they need. How to offer. This is the stuff of resistance, of new ways of being when the old ways crumble.”
Of course, living with others, even in individual family units, requires cooperation and compromise and the difficult and delicate wobble of meeting others’ needs without abandoning your own. Building meaningful connections, networks, and webs of relationships is not easy. We don’t always know how to rely on each other or how to work through conflict to build lasting relationships. Coordinating schedules, making time, working through challenges can be exhausting and messy, especially if we get to choose whether or not to engage.
I really believe that moving towards connection and interdependence instead of rigid ideas about what everyone must do for themselves could help us all shift away from calculations of who gets what and who deserves more. And yet, our culture’s “scarcity mindset” and the “mathematics of worthiness” often affect our own feelings of self worth. I feel so vulnerable asking for help and find that a NO can be devastating. But helping and doing makes it easy to feel like we matter, we are contributing, we have value.
On the other side, I know that when I answer a need, I don’t spend time worrying about how much the person deserves help or whether they should be doing more for themselves. It often feels impossible to treat ourselves as generously and gently as we try to treat others. But I’m starting to think that asking for help might be a way to shift these internal narratives away from believing that our worth is dependent on what we can give. When we are trying to create meaningful connections and build a community or economy that moves away from self reliance and selfishness, asking for help is a valuable contribution.
When I have extra seedlings, or garlic scapes, or eggs I offer them to my neighbors. If I notice that that my friends are scarce on time or energy I might to bring them dinner or ask if there is something else they need. It feels good to help and to be useful to others but to create these interconnected nets giving is not enough. Strong ties come from two strings, asking and offering, giving and taking, vulnerability and resilience, knotted together.
Warmly,
Anna