With no permission from the author, I will quote from Anne Lamott's wonderful book, HELP THANKS WOW. She is talking about trying to help someone else when it just isn't working.
When you get your hooks out of something, it can roll away, down its own hill, away from you. It can breathe again. It got away from you, and your tight sweaty grip, and your stagnant dog breath, the torture of watching you do somersaults and listening to you whine "What if?" and "Wait, wait, I have ONE more idea..."
You can go from monkey island, with endless chatter, umbrage, and poop-throwing, to what is happening in front of me. God, what a concept. It means I stop trying to figure it out, because trying to figure it out is exhausting and crazy-making. Doping it has become the problem.
So when we cry out Help, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of not going limp and not feeling that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own--or other people's--higher powers.
Help.
For those of us who have been here, we know this is true. We know that at first we have to repeat the process a thousand times a day, but the moments of release can start to stretch out into half hours and so on. I would like to make a link for you to this book, but I can't figure out how just now and I have to go give thanks for all the help that streams to me.
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