When Ya Gotta Go . . .

There’s a disgusting commercial for a bladder control product that has a person bounding up in the middle of some social situation and excluding themselves because they “really gotta go.”  Maybe the reason that the commercial is effective is because most of us can relate with the person’s predicament; when ya gotta go, ya gotta go. 

Daniel Goleman shared research in his excellent TED presentation (see Look Both Ways) that made it clear that being in a hurry is a big reason for us not stopping to help when we see someone in trouble.  Yesterday’s posting spoke of the disincentive of becoming overwhelmed; we steer clear of the needy because what they will ask is more than we can handle.  But today I’d like to look at haste and compulsion as reasons we fail to respond to compassion that wells up inside us.

Hurrying too much to be human: I’m guilty as charged.  Driving to work I felt an urgency to get there.  I always arrived well before the scheduled start of the day, because I always obsessed about getting things done.  I didn’t always get things done, understand; I just obsessed about it.  So on the drive, I naturally fell into thinking about the things that I needed to do that day, and before long I felt a compulsion the get there, to get going.  You might call this “Gotta get there, I really gotta get there” mode, or GGTIRGGT.  Go ahead, try to pronounce it. GGTIRGGT; it makes you clench your teeth, doesn’t it?  And compelled as I was to get things done at work, I generally tried to do just one more thing before leaving to drive to a meeting in the city, and bingo!  I’m gritting my teeth fretting about being late, humiliated.  Driving from my office to meetings in the city, I was always in a hurry.   And it was always in this mode that I would see some lady struggling to change a tire, or some old man trying to carry a too-heavy parcel to their car, or some handicapped person struggle to get across a busy street.

Dammit I’d say to myself.  Why did these things always happen when I was in a hurry?  My screenplay mind has a narrator appear in the scene like Rod Serling in a Twilight Zone episode and say “What our would-be Good Samaritan John Daniels doesn’t yet know is that he’s always in a hurry.”  And now it’s Albert Einstein, for God’s sake, pointing out that if a person is in a hurry 100% of the time, there is a zero% possibility of stopping, momentum being too great to satisfy the urging of those “mirror neurons” and stop.  And geez, now it’s Robert Young who played Marcus Welby M.D. on TV explaining the effect of stomach acid and blood pressure caused by frustration-driven stress, and the three of them are a Greek Chorus now, singing of the foolishness of speeding past life on the way to work.

I recall those days on Warrington Street when the snow was so heavy that schools were closed.  We’d all be out in front of our houses shoveling.  We’d shovel past our own sidewalks, shoveling each other’s, joining up to shovel the old walks and steps of the old folks who couldn’t do their own.  And we’d gang up to dig out our cars, and get behind and push, and yell which way for the driver to turn the wheel.  And it would be hours before, all the walks shoveled and cars dug out, we would each head back to our warm kitchens and sit with a cup of coffee and listen to J.P.McCarthy talk about the weather with people calling in.  And I’d think of calling him and telling him what a great block we lived on, here in Detroit, where we were such good neighbors.

Neighbor.  That’s what the Good Samaritan Story was all about, you know.  Some smart guy asked Jesus “and just who is this neighbor that I’m supposed to love as I do myself?” 

Now, look at my two stories – myself not being able to stop to help people because I’m in a hurry, and myself on Warrington on the morning after the snow.  Put yourself in each of them and let your mirror neurons take over, guiding you to feel my feelings.  How do they make you feel?  I hope that you feel as good imagining that Warrington morning as I did, and that you find that it feels a lot better than the zooming by story.

Yesterday Bobbi shared a helpful comment in Bliss or Blisters  about being sustained in a four-year caregiving relationship by the way she felt about the person she helped, and she confessed some fears about entering other helping relationships now.  

Please read it and share your own stories.  What makes you stop and help?  What makes you not?

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.