“You never ask for help,” they say. An offense to them, those who would help. Because help can be more selfish than its wrapper suggests. The word is a sweet sugar coating to motives that are often more acrid. To accept their help is to reinforce their facade – their goodness – and I rebuke the idea that I have a responsibility to you when I am the helpless.

“You never ask for help” – but what help does the man on the thousand mile journey need? He walks beside a river, and he has water. His route winds through towns, so there is food in reach. The world lends a breeze, so he doesn’t need fanning. The only thing the able bodied man on an arduous journey could really use is a shortcut – a way to bypass the real work that only he can do. 

So what would you have me ask for? And why do you need me to ask at all? 

You want to help? Don’t add labor to my charge. Don’t ask me to map your service while I tend to my own map. Don’t task me with correspondence while I crest hill after hill. Why should I do yet one more thing – and for you? Me, on my arduous journey, taking a little of your load so you can say you’ve taken a little of mine. And yet I am the one still walking. I have a thousand miles yet to go. 

You want to help me? Leave me to my journey. 

And if you must, lay a soft bed for me beside the riverbank a little further down my route. Pick the berries from the bush I’ll pass sometime around high noon. Scrub my clothes upon the river rocks so they’ll be dry by the time I wake to carry on. If you must supersede my path, do the work that I needn’t, and leave me to the work that only I can do.

I have accepted my course, and I bear it some days with little but ire. So, please, polish your ego on someone else’s whetstones. Don’t saddle me with more responsibility, with any amount of guilt, with managerial duties. 

I must do what I must do to get to the place beyond the thousand miles. I bear no ill will to the things I must push out of my way.