Reach Not To The Drowning Man

Knowing The Danger In Other People's Desperation

by Roland Kriewaldt

Suffering turns some people into selfish predators who seek comfort at any expense. Helping them may hurt us. Here's a metaphor.

Reach not to the drowning man for in the desperation to survive his own immediate ordeal, he may pull us under with him. Out of selfish necessity, he cares not for his potential rescuers. Survival is his primary objective, at any cost. We may pay the price, becoming the sacrifice that he is willing to make in order to survive another day.

Panic has overtaken his perceptions, and biological selfishness his objectivity; he has returned to the primal state of being. He is an animal, and far from civilized or consequential about his actions.

He flails through life, always caught in life's undertow. He is without consequences or consideration; his actions motivated by a need to to live through this one day with no interest in learning to swim.

In reaching out to help him, our reward may be that we ourselves are pulled under and drowned. It's an inadvertant trap. My advice is to throw him a rope, but don't tie it around your neck.