Reflection by Edgar Cahn
From childhood on, we are taught: Do it yourself.
We define “Growing up” as a trajectory to self-sufficiency. We are told: “Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps.” Reliance on others is characterized as a kind of character defect. Dependency is regarded as pathological.
Given that premise, how can TimeBankers praise, promote, and practice “asking for help when you don’t need it?”
Because often it’s the relationship, not the transaction that matters. In TimeBanking, it is the asking that turns strangers into potential friends and potential friends into real ones. In a world where more and more families are headed by a single adult who has no time for parenting, where fifty percent of marriages end up in separation and divorce, where forty percent of seniors live alone, we need ways to reweave connectedness. Maybe we could do everything by ourselves. But what are the consequences of isolation?
Two observations might just be relevant:
(1) solitary confinement in prison is viewed as the severest penalty authorities can impose and recent human rights organizations have condemned the practice as a form of torture that violates fundamental human rights.
(2) as a species, we have evolved from primates who gained a Darwinian advantage because, when the male partner was killed, other females helped look after the survivor’s children so that the survivor could leave the offspring to continue foraging for food.
Our species survived because of empathy and connectedness and interdependence. We are hard wired to reach out to each other.
TimeBanking simply uses technology to create circuits of trust and support.
“Asking when we don’t need it” sustains and renews those circuits for when we will need them. But it does something more: creating and activating those circuits becomes part of who we are and provides a self-renewing answer to the eternal question: Why are we here?
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