Taking a Life
I know you’re looking at the title of this post and thinking what the heck is this about. Is this about taking someone’s physical life? No, it is about taking away someone’s chance to solve a problem, to work hard to fill in the hole that they have dug for themselves, to let them stand and admire their hard work, to let them see their mistakes and let them work hard to make the changes that they need to make to turn it around.
My wife looks at me sometimes when I am very cautious to help when I have family members in trouble. She wonders why I hesitate. I see the value in hard work. I see the value of buckling down and changing the way you live and yes sometimes going without. I had all of these wonderful lessons. Was it hard sometimes? Yes. But working through them and changing my ways is what has made me who I am today.
Sometimes I have tried to help people and I have reached out to pull them out of the hole they were in with money or time or whatever just to see them go back right back or even into a deeper hole they dug for themselves. There is a word “enable” it means to make able. But sometimes instead of making someone able, you love them so much that you do their life lesson for them. I have done this and watched others do it: enable others so they don’t learn from their life lessons. But my question is: while you are helping someone so much that they do not learn from their life, who’s doing the living? I believe if you do the work for someone else, you take away their chance to really live and you take away from living your own life.
I am glad that over the years I solved my own problems and can look over my life, and see it is mine. I am glad I made mistakes so I found how to solve the problems and know how to work to change my actions and my life. I learned to ask for people’s opinion but only take them if they made sense to me and I am now a good problem solver. In my experience of life the only way to learn it is by doing the work yourself. The work that I have done is my foundation and makes me a contributor to society. I believe when you enable someone by doing their work for them they will never learn the lesson that was handed them; you are taking their life by taking their life lesson away.
I Healed my Crohn's Colitis 