How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

by Ram Dass

Once we come to associate it with rewards, we start to use helping in the service of a wide range of personal motives other than the expression of natural compassion. We might empty the trash in order to get the use of the family car, or go to the store to fetch ingredients so that Mother will make our favorite cookies. We might be seeking to compensate for a lack of self-esteem, for feelings of unworthiness or incompleteness. Need praise? Help out. Or perhaps we’re looking for a form of atonement: there’s guilt to assuage. For many, the ability to aid others can provide a needed sense of power or respectability. Maybe some of us help out as a way of compensating for a deeper sense of helplessness; we don’t have to face our own quite so much when we’re busy treating someone else’s. Or maybe we’re just plain lonely. Intimacy is what we’re looking for, and it’s often there to be found in a helping relationship. Rare indeed is the individual for whom the helping act does not arise in part out of some personal motive. To the extent that it does, however, what we are looking for is a role that meets a need … our need. We’re looking to be helpers, not simply to be helpful. A personal agenda leads us to invest in the position, not simply the function. And we invest in others’ reactions to it as well.