Made to Help

Eating my muesli breakfast in the old familiar Merkur, this thought struck:

 

We are made to help each other.

 

Surely, not a profound epiphany, but how often do we stop to consider? There was the butcher slicing some meat for the customer so that his body would be nourished and fortified and continue to live. There was another pouring the coffee that would give both pleasure and energy to somebody’s day. Soon we will check out with the hotel employee who helped give us shelter these past seven nights. Outside in the hall are the cleaners waiting to swoop in and make the space available for the next traveler in need. Once checked out, we will board the bus and the driver will take us to the train, a whole other group of humans dedicated to helping us get from one place to another. 

 

If you have the leisure and the interest to think deeper into this, the chain of help goes far and wide— the truckers who brought the meat and coffee, the people who packaged it, the farmers who grew and tended it. Then further back to the people who made the trucks and buses and trains and the mechanics who kept them running and further yet back to the people who made the tools to make the vehicles and further yet back to the steelworkers. Not to mention the bankers and the lawyers and the doctors. Oh yeah, and the teachers.

 

If we stop to consider how deeply necessary we are to each other and how most people’s professions are built around giving needed services so that we might both live and thrive and enjoy life, it’s astounding that we don’t walk around in a state of constant gratitude. Instead, we get all caught up on the different names of God or who was born in the right place speaking the right language and listening to the right music and think we have the luxury to ignore, dislike, put down, marginalize, hurt, oppress and hate “the other.” Even when “the other” has proven to be essential to our existence and we have benefitted enormously from their labor. (Think chattel slavery, for example.)

 

Is anybody teaching these lessons in school? Wouldn’t it be interesting to take any random object—a pencil, for example— and trace it back to the endless chain of people and professions who brought it to our school desk?

 

And so I give thanks to all who brought my muesli to me as I bid farewell to Salzburg and head south to Slovenia.