Last week I went to a Shabbat dinner as part of a Jewish social justice group I participate in here in Denver. We rotate hosts, and this week we sat outside in the luscious backyard of one of our participants, surrounded by a giant stand of lemon balm. Yes, life was good.
At the end of the night, we started carrying all of the dishes and such to their back porch so they could bring them in and clean up (they didn’t want us to bring them inside because there was someone home who was being cautious of covid!). Pretty typical, but it got me thinking.
Community care is kind of like offering to carry the dishes in at the end of a dinner party. There were about 6 of us left at that point, and we each did 2-3 trips. If we hadn’t helped, that would have been ~15 trips for the host to bring everything in! And, of course, it was no sweat off our backs to help.
When we focus on community care > capitalism, we shift from “this is your problem” to “this is our problem.” And while bringing the dishes to the porch was an incredibly simple and not-very-noble act, it sparked an image for me of how we can collectively support one another. How we don’t have to go at it alone, even though the society we live in is so heavily focused on “personal responsibility.” A quick google search tells us that it’s our job to clean up if we hosted a dinner party. Our party, our problem.
And while dinner parties are, perhaps, not quite the biggest issue at hand, this type of thinking is pervasive. It trickles down into “I am overwhelmed, but I brought that upon myself,” and therefore not asking for help. It can infiltrate all aspects of our lives—from how we show up in the workspace, to how we show up as business owners, friends, parents, community members, and beyond. It also heavily impacts how we can create a more just society.
I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts about burnout because, well, you know (#deepinit). I recently listened to a couple of episodes with Emily and Amelia Nagoski who wrote the book Burnout (which I need to get my hands on). They share that we need to move beyond the “self-care” paradigm (a.k.a., cleaning up all by ourselves) to just… care. “When you think you need more grit or persistence, will you really need is more help. When you think you need more discipline, you need more kindness. And when you look at others and think they need more grit, what they need is more help. And when you think they need more discipline, what they need is more kindness,” they explain. This quote has been swirling around my head for weeks.
We don’t have to go at it alone. We don’t need to “buckle down” and “push through.” We are taught that our problems are our own, and every time we don’t ask for help when we need it, we, too, are perpetuating this culture (not to place blame, sometimes asking for help, given the cultural propensity to avoid it, may cause further problems).
I’m not sharing this from a place of “I figured it out,” but more from a place of reminder to us all. I, too, often struggle with asking for help. In those cases, I like to think if the tables were reversed, would I have wanted that person to ask me for help? Almost always, time the answer is yes. I wouldn’t want a co-worker or friend or loved one to “have more grit” to push through a challenging situation, I’d want to support them.
As I seek to serve as a fractal for the world I want to exist within, a world that prioritized rest and equity and care over consumption and competition, this is an important reminder to myself. And, if you’re here, that’s presumably the type of world you seek to participate in too, so perhaps you may want to join me?
How can you practice kindness and ask for help instead of forcing grit and discipline?
Insightful as always 🤗 For what ideas it may spark, I’ve also been considering the discipline “spectrum”, recently. I personally find that a base level of discipline (or perhaps routines) are healthy for me - similar to setting boundaries. I landed on the idea that being on the extreme of either end (discipline deficit or surplus) is when things become unhealthy 😌