Invite relationship: ask for help
Ask for help: invite relationship.
In an evocative personal correspondence, Cheryl Honey writes “Asking people for help is a great way to expand relationships!”
Asking for help is a way to be human and make available the relationship field. This is going Star Trek one better: they could raise and lower their shields: humans can extend meeting fields. There are killing fields, there were before them meeting fields. Exchange your shield for our field. Create the field with us.
Inviting relationship is more than saying Hi. It is being vulnerable, risking a part of yourself to face another. This is beyond what Buber told us: his sounds a little like the beginning of a wrestling match. This is more an uncovering of a wound and asking for care, or the producing of an egg and asking for an incubator. It has the possibility of possibilities, of creativity or destruction, of acceptance or rejection or worse, ignoring. It is risking all possibility. So meeting someone for the first time, to be true meeting, needs to involve at least one of the persons extending vulnerability.
Asking for help is therefore innately more powerful than sharing an idea or a business card. It is not pushing, nor even pulling, but putting at mercy. Telling my story, my fascination, is not as inviting as seeking help, demonstrating human need. We are drawn as water downhill to the person who needs, and particularly the one who needs us.
This is not to say that asking for help will always draw help. It may draw disdain and pushing away. These are not the people we want at this time; maybe later their views and attitudes will change. Then the invitation may still be open, or a newer one extended, and we shall then be allies.
If there be conflict, this is good. Life demands conflict—consult any excellent novel. Life needs opposition. The key is to make the opposition constructive—just because we don’t agree doesn’t mean we will not produce good work together. Opposers can turn to put opposite shoulders to the same plow.
Invite relationship: ask for help.
You are not talking about Its but about a specific human being and a shareable human need.
:- Doug.
