After a week of dragging my butt home each day, feeling a bit smaller and more beaten each day, I needed to change something. Off went the shoes. Walking out to work and arriving home was now strictly a barefoot affair.
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“Where’s your shoes dad?” It was a fair question as the boys were still stuck in their school shoes and quite fairly wondering why in the hell I was able to go barefoot.
After a week of dragging my butt home each day, feeling a bit smaller and more beaten each day, I needed to change something. Off went the shoes. Walking out to work and arriving home was now strictly a barefoot affair.
Symbolic gesture maybe, but it worked a treat and has become a part of my daily thing. (Note to self—start thinking about an alternate strategy when winter hits).
I first tried it after hearing a fellow phone crisis counsellor using it as a strategy before entering the phone room. The theory was to leave the shoes and your life at the door and enter the space where you could help people through really tough challenges.
Tried it, loved it. It didn’t save me from getting home with a brain swimming in adrenaline after confronting some of the life challenges the callers were going through.
When I first started working on the phones, there were lots of strategies taught and shared to help stay together and do the best you could for the callers. I recently returned to the phones and went back through the training.
The single strategy which squared me away and enables me to now pick up the phone and expect the most challenging call every time—help from a stranger is better than no help at all. While it may sound a little flippant, I knew I was onto something that would help me every time I picked up the phone.
Basking in the glory of my secret revelation, I had a wider think and noted to my very celebratory self that the concept of lending a hand was neither new, revolutionary or something I could run off to the patents office with.
Nonetheless, I was still bloody happy that it was a lesson which I had seen and experienced the power of first hand.
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I’m not going to get on my soapbox and begin evangalsising or starting a global movement. Thankfully the world has gifted people keeping that fire burning across the world.
But what about lighting our own little spark from time to time?
I’m not talking about finding more time in our busy lives to add in additional charity or humanitarian work, but what if you could make a change in smaller ways, easier ways, ways that require us to just take a moment to look outside ourselves and actually see what is happening around us.
I will put my hand up first—I have walked past people or situations and had the following (or similar) thought roll through my mind, “I’m sure somebody else will help.”
I’ve done it. We’ve all done it.
Chicki and I had one of those moments driving home the other night. People driving around a woman in a stalled car, all in a rush to get home. In the blink of an eye, chicki and I looked at each other and it was action stations. Out of the car, barefoot and in wet paddling gear to push a broken down 4×4 off the road.
It took a good push to get it moving and then something cool happened…..we were joined by a jogger and all of a sudden their were three, and we were on the way.
Hmmmmm…..two people taking action and a volunteer joining in, sounds like some crazy car pushing global movement. Now before the board of NRMA and the many tow truck drivers start putting us on some road watch list, no we aren’t now providing roadside assistance.
What we did was lend a hand. It felt good to take a small detour and help out.
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So what now, for you, maybe not much …maybe you’ll think twice before you walk on by.
I trust you’ll know the one you should walk past, they could also be the one that needs a 000 call. The fact is, you could likely get a, “no mate, I’m fine” … at least you will know, and at least they will know that somebody saw them and cared enough to ask.
This post originally appeared at Live to Learn.
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Photo: Nicholas_T/Flickr
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