How Can I Help?: Stories and Reflections on Service

by Ram Dass

As we watch ourselves going off to work, then, it becomes a little like reading The Little Engine That Could. Up the mountain: “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.” Coming down: “I thought I could, I thought I could, I thought I could.” Model train, maybe … but always climbing mountains … likely to run down sooner or later. But all this can be witnessed. The same observation that made it possible for us to note our reasons for acting can catch us in the process of identifying ourselves as the actor. We recognize how we’re “taking things personally.” We see how our self-esteem is riding on a particular job. It’s clear how invested we are in a project, how each detail must bear our stamp, how we need to check and confirm every step, as if our very sense of identity were at stake. Of course, it can be. But it needn’t be. We’ve performed tasks in other ways than this before. We experience freedom from being the doer in those moments in which we are so at one with our activity (now with this child in the classroom, now with another; now at the bedside of one patient telling jokes, now in the next room hearing someone’s grief) that it simply doesn’t occur to us that we’re “doing” at all. Everything’s just happening. We’re all action.