The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble/Chapter 14
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! (Hamlet, Act ii, Scene 2.)
There can be no conclusion to a discussion of the art of helping any more than there can be a last chapter in the art of living; for living continues as long as life, and life touches life subtly and unmeasurably down through the generations. Forever, while man is part of the universe, the process of adjustment will endure, always involving new relationships and new situations, shaping and changing him and carrying with it ever the issue of happiness or trouble.
Each one of us, limited though his days may be, is caught up in the sweep of this vast ebb and flow of life. Nature working within him expresses herself in terms of her own timelessness. She is unhurried. Growth is a product of the years. Man, being but part of the whole, may become impatient, content with what would be incomplete. Nature is comprehensive and eternal.
To have grasped this lesson is to have made a beginning of learning the art of helping. We are continually seeking the immediate. We search for panaceas and we want instantaneous change. In a few days we would make different a human being who for three or four decades has been evolving to what heis. Yet if the body develops so slowly that in age one can recognize the youth, how can we expect greater rapidity in the transformation of personality which must express itself through the body and which is influenced by it.
Unfortunately, our very books contribute to the illusion that change in man is an easy and an expeditious process. When in three or four hundred pages the biography of a lifetime may be reviewed, the years themselves seem to take on a kind of cinematographic speed and unconsciously we come to expect the same instantaneous development in the people about us. The illustrations that have been used in the preceding pages may each have required a very few moments for the reading, but they represent for the most part months and years of effort. Moreover, these stories are cross-sections. They are not the whole life. The necessity of describing the application of a principle has placed an emphasis upon one incident to the exclusion of many other important occurrences.
Nor can it be said that after one, two, or three years an individual has achieved a permanent adjustment. There is no such thing as permanency in adjustment, for adjustment is constant change. Always a new crisis is arising, a new event occurring; and the whole struggle must be gone over with again. Not until the whole of a man's career is reviewed can a verdict be announced. While life is being lived, one can only say that thus far the individual has succeeded in overcoming his difficulties and in building wisely for the future.
In some situations a successful adjustment is not possible. There are wildernesses of the mind from which to the eye of present knowledge there seems to be no egress. This applies not merely to the person who is feeble-minded or who is suffering from some chronic form of mental disease, but also to the large number of people who live in that psychic borderland which divides the clearly normal and usual from the clearly abnormal and unusual, the people of whom science admits its ignorance by such diagnoses as constitutionally inferior, psycho-neurotic, and the like. For these unhappy individuals any but the most temporary adjustment is exceedingly difficult. They seem to be unable to hold long to any one course and they sink before the slightest waves of circumstance. With such persons, and with many others, our very ignorance often renders us incapable of helping where help is needed. Just as before the discovery of the antitoxins for diphtheria and tetanus hundreds of people died whose lives might have been prolonged, so, for the lack of knowledge of many things we are unable to aid individuals in the making of adjustments that in the future may be facilitated through the development of new techniques. There are limitations, also, of physique and environment which prevent the person in trouble from achieving anything but a life that, judged by the standards of persons of greater opportunity and endowment, would at best be unsatisfactory. There are great handicaps in the absence of the institutions which in time our municipalities and states will establish. It may be evident that the only solution of a man's difficulties lies in a stay in a psychopathic hospital, but if there is no room for him he must forego treatment. The same issue arises in dealing with feeble-mindedness, in the treatment of tuberculosis, andin many other problems. Small wonder is it that often when success in helping a human being might be expected it is failure that is met with instead.
On the other hand, the changes that take place in people are greater than we realize. In our search for the dramatic we overlook the very strength of nature's workmanship. We expect a revolution and fail to see the far more certain, though more gradual, process of evolution. When we realize the handicaps under which the greater part of humanity labors; when we consider the close physical proximity in which most people live with one another, and the ignorance, and the malnutrition, and the lack of recreation, and the years spent in an unfavorable environment; the accomplishments of the weakest and poorest individual become colossal. It must never be forgotten that with life as it is to-day the greatest material achievement that most men can hope for is the bare support of a family on the margin of existence. It is only the person who is situated in especially fortunate circumstances, or who has very unusual combinations of native endowment and character, who can win the means of obtaining the cultural and æsthetic opportunities that add much of beauty and interest to life. The vast majority of people live their lives through without even securing for their homes the kind of dwelling that would give them the environment they desire—no matter how modest their wants in this direction may be. Yet, in spite of these and many other handicaps, men attain to happiness, attain to it out of the barest of equipments and with the least of facilities.
No one who has watched the making of such an adjustment as the adjustment to tuberculosis, can fail to wonder at the marvels of which the average human being is capable. To realize the eternal watchfulness that is the means by which the consumptive wins the mastery of his life; to sense the steadfastness of purpose, the control of self, and the persistence which the living of a regularized existence involves; to appreciate what the foregoing of physical recreation and the limitation to his hours of activity mean; to realize all this and then to see men find contentment in spite of their disease, is to know that man can adjust himself to anything.
The more one works with people in trouble, the greater his confidence in human kind and his respect for human beings becomes. Seeing what they accomplish in overcoming their difficulties brings an ever deepening faith in their capacity for self-help. Let a man be free to be himself and his success is almost assured. Aid him, if he asks it, to a realization of the adjustment which he must make, interpreting to him, if need be, those with whom he is associated. Quicken his desires, if quickening they require, or show him that from which he can derive stability and inspiration. Encourage him to make his own plans, and to do his own thinking, and through it all strive to see him as he is and to understand and appreciate him.
This is the point of view from which social case workers approach the difficulties of the men and the women who come to them for help. It is a point of view to be sought by every person who is so placed that he may influence other people. It is as applicable in the daily relationships of life as it is in the most complicated forms of trouble. It is a philosophy that any one may apply to the making of his own adjustments.
To him who thus strives to understand his fellows and their problems life begins to reveal itself in deepening richness and wonder. The old fears, the old prejudices disappear leaving him free to perceive the truth, the truth whose facets are myriad so that one may gaze upon it through eternity and not make an ending. Out of life's very difficulties, out of our own frailty comes renewed appreciation of all that living can mean and the privilege that is ours in its practice. Who does not thrill at the miracle of being alive and of holding comradeship with that most marvelous of creatures, his fellow man! Transcending the vicissitudes of experience is the challenge of the greatest of the arts.
The end