I've been fortunate not to be raised that way, though I know that the way I was raised wasn't all that healthy.  My childhood came in on the other end of the spectrum--my parents rarely if ever did anything for me, so I had to do virtually anything I wanted on my own.  While that naturally led to other problems, helplessness isn't one of the attributes that I've grown up with.

It's easy to feel helpless, though.  Parents feel it when their kids are sick.  People feel it when their pet animals are ill.  A worker feels it when their company lays off a ton of people for no reason other than a need to save money--these people lose their jobs not because of anything they've done, and they have no say in the decision.  That's happened to me once, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.  Trust me, the feeling was an awful one.  I was lucky in that I realized that I wasn't helpless as far as recovering from the layoff was concerned, but that was something different.

What do we do when we feel helpless?  Some of the people who speak below have very good ideas about how to go about minimizing the helplessness and being productive and proactive in other ways.  If my son or daughter is laying in bed, sick, then there's obviously nothing that I can do to make them better other than follow the doctor's directions.  I'm completely helpless as far as the illness is concerned, but I'm not helpless in other ways.  I can comfort, I can encourage, I can simply be there for the person, even as the sickness and the medicines take their course.  I can't make them healthy, but I can make them feel better for the moment.  And a lot of those moments can add up to something very positive for my child.

The world's politics seem to be going haywire these days, and some pretty awful people are being put in positions of power that negatively affect millions of others.  In the face of this reality, I am completely powerless.  I have absolutely no power at all to affect the world's political stages.  And that's okay--I don't like this fact, but I know that I don't have it in me to become a politician and change the world's politics.  I do have the power of educating myself as to what exactly is going on and helping others to understand it.  And if I do that, I can balance out my helplessness in one area with an exercise of power that I do have in another.

Perhaps, at its heart, dealing with helplessness is a question of finding the balances in our lives that allow us to move forward in productive and fulfilling ways.  After all, if Route 3 is closed because a bridge is out, I'm helpless to do anything about the bridge or the road closure.  But I am able to take a detour on Route 2 and still get where I need to go.  One problem arises, though, when someone had their heart set on taking Route 3, and they view their trip on Route 2 as a failure.  Perhaps they were planning on seeing a beautiful waterfall on Route 3, and all they can think about is the fact that they were robbed of the chance to see it.  Yes, it's true that I'm helpless in the face of changing the situation--I can't fix the bridge--but it's also true that I have it in me to accept that truth and move on with my life on a different path.  And who knows?  I may meet one of the most important people in my life when I take Route 2, when I stop to grab a cup of coffee in a restaurant I never would have seen had I taken Route 3.

Our lives are full of Route 3s, even if we don't see them as such.  When we're young, most of us go to the schools that are determined by the place we live--we were helpless when it came to choice, but we usually just accepted that and made the best of the school we were in.  When plans get canceled because of snowstorms, we have no ability at all to change the weather, so we do something else.  If a loved one is dying, we have the choice--do we spend our time being frustrated and angry and sad because we're helpless to change the reality, or do we find ways to make their final days more positive, more pleasant?

Sometimes it's very healthy to look at a situation and realize, "I can't do anything about that," and let it go.  We don't always have to be in control, and we don't always have to "fix" things, and make everything better for everyone.  We all face situations in which we feel completely helpless, and that feeling may actually reflect the reality sometimes.  But we can balance that helplessness by finding something else that can balance out that helplessness, that can help us to advance in our lives instead of standing still, not moving forward, because we've thought that the bridge being out means we can't go anywhere, rather than realizing that the bridge being out is simply pushing us onto a different road, one that we hadn't planned on taking.

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