The Challenge
Sometimes we don’t just help people because they need help. We help them because we find it difficult what happens, inside us, when we don’t.
I see this in relationships, between partners, lovers, parents and children. In work relations, in friendships, and I, too, have done this countless times: When someone struggles, we interfere. When someone is in pain, we try to take it away. When someone is about to make a “mistake”, we so fervently try to prevent it from happening.
This is what we do as helpers: We fix, we solve, we glue. We prevent, we clean, we soothe—all in the name of love. All for the sake of care.
That is, until we realize that all this helping not only wears us out, but actually withholds the other from going through their own process. That it prevents them from moving through the learning curve in the school of life.
But the truth is, it’s much easier to stay in control than to let life happen and let go.
It is much easier to distract someone from their pain or discomfort—with advice, food, or entertainment—than to be with it fully. It’s much easier to reassure someone than to sit in silence while they find their own grounding. It’s much easier to solve a problem than to let someone else give it a try.
This is what someone wrote to me the other day. “What I find difficult about letting go is how to actually do it. Where is the balance between holding on and letting go?”
The Resolution
Thinking about this question, I discovered something that feels rather important.
I realized that finding the balance between holding on and letting go, actually, is the true expression of love.
Love, as we so often think, is not an endless stream of giving. Love is not constantly removing stones from someone’s path. And love is not protecting the other from an uncomfortable experience; love is not preventing life from touching someone.
Love is something else entirely. It’s holding space for another being’s flourishing. It is allowing someone to move through their own journey, while I—as their friend, parent, or partner—remain fully and completely present through it all. Love is that balance between holding space and helping.
But to be that kind of love requires practice. To find that balance asks for presence. A presence first confronts us with what we were trying to avoid all along:
The discomfort that comes with another’s suffering.
The anxiety that arises when we no longer control the outcome.
Recognizing the missed opportunities, allowing the mistakes, and the uncertainty of the future.
It means facing the fear of not being needed, useless, or unwanted—which is the fear of not being loved.
So what love actually asks of us is to become that space that can hold the transformation. To be that presence where we can meet ourselves and the other, inside our own living process. Like a midwife assisting birth, love is a practice of witnessing and participation; a way to let things expand beyond themselves.
