HELPING OR HURTING?
Photo by Liz Wuerffel
I stumbled on this question as a mom in the midst of a classic parenting task that I had been through hundreds of times already. Technically speaking, I should have been an expert at it, but getting my preschooler outside to have some fun in the middle of a Minnesota deep freeze while standing in the tiny entryway of our old farmhouse, sweating in my own gear as I tried to help Reuben get on his, our two beloved dogs expressing their eagerness to join us by racing around our feet barking and howling, and Reuben egging them on with his own barks and howls, turned into what Pema Chodron calls “the squeeze.”
It started out as a rhetorical question directly solely at Reuben. “Helping or hurting?” I shouted. Then I asked it again, just as loud the second time. Only this time I heard myself shouting. So the next time I asked, it was a bit quieter, with some genuine curiosity behind the question. I really wanted to know what he thought. And because I had calmed down, so had the dogs, and so had Reuben. The truth was we both needed a check on our behavior.
No matter how right we feel about how wrong someone else’s behavior is, the most important question is what happens next. Are you, with your behavior, going to help or hurt?
