Saving Others vs. Supporting Others

You have never lived out a single moment of anyone else's life. You have only successfully lived out the moments of your life. This is a very important point to make, because it's a really innocent and easy tendency to live as if you are capable of living in someone else's experience. It leads to us living as "rescuers" and martyrs, trying to endlessly change the experiences of others in hopes that it will make us feel validated and fulfilled as an individual. And I can only say this because this has been something that I have done for years and years, and only just recently am I really waking up out of it.

We're all here to help each other, but not in the way that we think. It's not like we realize that we can't live for other people so we just become totally dismissive of their experiences. It's more like we realize that sometimes the single greatest contribution we can make in the life of another is to let them have their own life without tampering or interfering with it excessively. (Obviously, if someone's leg got run over by a car in your presence, you would call an ambulance. That's not excessive, that's a natural response to reality. Anyway.)

Most people, when they are going through unavoidable pain, loss, difficulty, and struggle don't need to be "saved" from their experience at all. They need all the love, support, and encouragement in the world, which can be offered by you without an insistence that their experience needs to be different in your presence. To assume that other people can't handle their own experience of life is to assume the same about yourself.

Most of the time, we don't need to save each other, we need to find the the self-worth that says, "no matter how I happen to be or how anyone else happens to be, may that be a moment to cultivate greater respect for the play of life than ever before." Life is no illusion. But if you think you know what it's like to be another human being, you're dreaming.

Empathy doesn't require you to pretend that you are responsible for living someone else's life for them. It only requires a willingness to be there for others as they go through what they are going through, and loving yourself and them every step of the way.