Self Enabling (Chapter 5)
Chapter Five
Self Enabling
In January of 1992, my mother had a heart attack. As we made plans to travel from the eastern United States to the west, my daughters efficiency in securing tickets and planning the trip resulted in over 50% savings in travel costs. She made it possible for three of us to travel together instead of traveling seperately for personal economic choices. Foresight in planning helps people to respond to emergencies, allowing for an easier and more efficient response. People helping people can result in accomplishing good things that might not be achieved throuth individual effort. Family plans over the years resulted in a reunion fund that allows for assistance to family members less able to participate when they might otherwise not come due to distance and/or economic reasons. A heartfelt appreciation goes out to those who help us reach beyond ourselves and accomplish that which was otherwise extremely diffcult if not impossible.
Enabling others, however, has its down side. when we draw upon the kindness, resources, and love of others to the neglect of our own effort toward self-reliance and self-sufficiency we become able to sustain a lifestyle or social-emotional pattern beyond which we are morally entitled. We also begin to resent the benefactor. Why? Because our own moral conscience cries out in protest and our personal dignity is offended at being enabled or sustained in our roadblocks to personal growth. Self-reliance comes from self awareness. As we recognize both opportunity and the constraints of adversity we begin to aspire to grater self-sufficiency.
Helping one to attain to a higher level of achievement such as completing school, estabnlishing a career, overcoming personal problems, repairing health, or avoiding disaster can be responsible growth for both. When one finds comfort in anothers contributions but feels manipulated, restrained, and unappreciated, he resents, rather than appreciates, the benefactor. Worse, they sometimes come to feel that what they receive is an entitlement and that the world owes them a living.
Our founding fathers declaired our hope by stating certain inalienable rights. Among them, life, liberty, and the pursiuit of happiness. Enabling one to subsist in a false economy of sustained support can take the energy out of life, restrict personal liberty, and limit our happiness. Someone once declared that its not so much the pursuit of happiness by the happiness of pursuit. Unless we feel the freedom of acceptance and the ability to pursue our own grand adventure, we are bound by the enslavement of constraint and false security. True freedom allows for growth. Complacency, resentment, dispair, anger, and other emotional and economic constraints are disarming. When desire and aspiration are gone, happiness seems an illusion. Although we enjoy the fantasy, no one truly believes the fairytale. When our future is based on fear and dread, we find pleasure in daydreams and pipe dreams. Our hope is for a miracle to deliver us. As we learn to enable ourselves, our fear turns to faith, our dispair to hope, and our problems into opportunity. We begin to climb upward to a happier and more fulfilling life.
AS story has been told of a man crossing through a graveyard at night. Se fell into an open grave. After much struggle, he sat exhausted in a corner. Later that night another man met the same fate in the same open grave. As he struggle to get out the first man reached out and, touching the new victim, said, "You'd just as well rest. You can't get out"! but he did!
When our life's experiences become the means of helping other, they become blessings to ourselves. As we begin to add joy to the lives of others, they become blessings to ourselves. As we begin to add joy to the lives of others, we become enfused with hope. Everyone has obstacles to overcome. kWhen we discover that the stumbling block and the stepping stone are the same object, then, like a person staring at an optical illusion, our perception changes and we see things we had overlooked from so limited a viewpoint. As our perception increases so should our conception. As we become aware of opportunities and can conception. As we become aware of opportunities and can approach the possibilities with optimism and self-confidence, we begin to apply our abilities toward the solutions to uor problems.
Self-help or do-it-yourself books have become the vogue. When we do our homework and are prepared, we can gain from the experience without loss of confidence or fear of self-defeat. We create a win-win situation where all can benefit. Self-reliance is not only enabling, it is enobling.
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