The ‘N’ Word

I arrived at our tiny airport to a scene of chaos. There were masses of people in the line for security, all departing around the same time. Everything was all jammed up; and the time required to get through security was creating stress for a lot of people, who were not sure if they were going to make their flights. I ran to the check-in kiosk and started punching my information in, to get my boarding pass as fast as I could. My anxiety immediately impacted my brain-I couldn’t get the machine to read my passport. Nor could my partner. We kept trying and failing. Finally I turned to a young man at the kiosk beside me, who was just starting to check in.

“What do I do with my passport?” I asked him. He leaned over and showed me that I had been putting it in the wrong slot. “Oh!” I said. “You figured it out!”
He gave me a big smile. “I’m a computer programmer,” he said, “My brain works like that.”

Later on that day, in the Calgary washroom, I was trying to fill up my water bottle from the tap at the sink. Not a drop was coming, no matter what I did. A little girl, about 5 years old was washing her hands in the sink next to me, without any trouble.

“Hey” I said to her, “you know how to make the water come out! How come I’m not getting any?”

She came over and showed me how to do it, by waving her hand in just the right place. She kept waving it, over and over, until my bottle was full.

“Wow,” I said, “I would have been thirsty without you today.”

Later on, I saw her with her mother, pointing at me, and shyly smiling. I went up to her mother and told her how much her daughter had helped me. They beamed.

I always forget, until I leave my stay-at-home-world, what it’s like in the travel world: I have to ask for help all the time. And it’s almost always a joy, an immersion in the natural generosity that lives in the hearts of human beings. Even though we are in a mess right now, shooting and torturing and hurting each other a lot, this basic kindness lives on.

It makes me wonder, for the thousandth time, why it is so hard for most of us to ask for help. Not just a little bit hard—we are talking about serious difficulty. Not just for men- women also struggle with it a lot. It’s a very odd program that we have running, the “I’m better if I can do it myself” software. Seems like it’s almost encoded in our genes. Thank God we know now that genes are also mutable, they can morph and transform, just like everything else. What do we get by trying to be so strong and independent? Would it be easier to reach out if we remembered that when we refuse to ask for help, we deprive our fellow humans of that experience of generosity, of belonging, of contributing something to life?

We all need this experience. Even a moment of generosity can change a life. Why did we come here, if not to support and nourish and love each other? But we don’t behave like that. We often behave as if we all came here to learn how to get along by ourselves, with a minimum amount of help from anyone else. We behave as if the word ‘need’ is a dirty word, as if we are going to get in trouble somehow, for using the ‘n’ word.

I’d like to change this program, if I could. I’d like the ‘n’ word to become part of our everyday vocabulary. But I’m not a wizard, or a queen, or a mistress of the universe. I can’t just wave a magic wand and soften the frozen energy in our bodies that says, “I must be strong. I must handle this by myself. I must not show anyone what I want or need.”

What I can do is keep practicing myself, to keep softening, keep asking for help, keep using the ‘n’ word, keep allowing myself to be more and more human and vulnerable. When I think I don’t need anyone, the space inside my heart gets pretty hard and cold. I might not even notice this, if I am used to living this way. It’s a beautiful turning, it’s the movement of grace, to let myself enter another landscape. I’d love it if we could live here together, in this landscape of openness and humility. We could come down, bit by bit, to this new ground, where it’s warm and moist and fertile. Where we can start growing a garden together, a new human culture, if we are ready.

If we could approach one another
soft-voiced, light, easy
still connected to
the small flowing child-self within

We would be like those gentle visitors
we imagine
from some evolved other world.
We could create that world here.

—Nina Mermey Klippe

with love,
Shayla