Help Amended

I have often wondered what help looks like and when I was much younger I set about a drawing task trying to work it out.  No-one was ever witness to this project which is a jolly good thing, because  it would have raised a few eyebrows from anyone who came across the pile of drawings with various strange things on with help written in weird ways. Instead it was all mine and in the end help came out as an Eagle. It has remained that way still and I have carried that piece of paper around in my head still. The word ‘help’ on the left and then an eagles head comes from the right hand side with its legs and talons outstretched as it comes in to land from off the page.  I never drew the whole eagle, just the head, neck, legs and claws in flight.  Whenever I wonder what help looks like I remember that picture.

One may wonder why help came out as an Eagle and I think it was because help can destroy, but it can also take one to safety. 

I supposed that to help your children you have to get to know them first. To help them you have to help in a way that helps them in a way they understand.  To help a friend, you have to get to know them too. Otherwise help isn’t helping that person, but actually helping yourself. A lot of the time we help people  motivated by our own needs. There is something true in the ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’ but I think many of us forget the last part of that – ‘love thyself’, and in doing so often forget the first part – ‘love thy neighbour’ and if both are remembered I wonder whether the all important ‘as’ is forgotten.

What is the point of all this?  Well, I think, perhaps, that the only person that really knows us is ourselves.  Only we can really truly help ourselves, and if we can’t be a neighbour to ourselves then what is left?  The best help comes from within -  when we stop looking to the outside world and start giving from the inside world.

I imagine this is all a pile of codswallop (my spell checker thinks that is a perfectly acceptable word which is reassuring), but it is strange what one thinks about when a car pulls out of a side road onto an empty main road, save for a motorcyclist, and narrowly misses squashing the  motorcyclist.

So that is the ramblings of the idiot on the motorcycle. I should have left my bike at the train station but that went wrong, as did my afternoon. 

I am off boating this weekend. I am my way to buy a new broom for the boat. The old broom is very past it and I could have gone to get one by car but it isn’t for the car, it is for the boat. Brooms ahoy.  I suppose there will be a national broom shortage declared before I even get to the shop.