On the Holmes and Rahe stress scale, a change in one’s residence is one of the top stressful events in life. Having recently sold my home, I can certainly attest to this. Preceding the move, my husband and I did an extraordinary amount of work—sorting, downsizing, cleaning, fixing, painting, staging, etc. My husband is a professional photographer, so he even took the photos for the real estate listing. After all our efforts, the house sold in short order.
Then came the move itself. While we had previously shouldered all the work in preparing for the transition, we certainly needed help with the move itself. We were very lucky to find Estefan—a wonderful mover. At this point, I was riddled with concerns. How could we keep our fragile items from breaking? What if our furniture got damaged? How on earth were they going to get the larger items down the ?? steps?
Each time I voiced my concerns to Estefan, he calmly assured me that he and his team would take care of everything and that we needn’t worry about a thing. I breathed a sigh of relief, and he delivered on his promises. Our belongings were in caring, capable hands, every aspect of the move went smoothly, and we were able to relax. Though we were capable of accomplishing a great deal of the work ourselves, there was no way we could pull off the actual move. We needed someone to do the heavy lifting, in this case quite literally.
This got me thinking about the phrase heavy lifting as a figure of speech, meaning “serious or difficult activities or work.” It occurred to me that everyone who provides a service draws on their expertise, knowledge, connections and desire to help others to do the “heavy lifting” for others. Whether it’s a concierge helping with dinner reservations at a busy restaurant, a retail sales person locating a difficult-to-find item, an electrician rerouting dangerous wiring, or an editor refining an author’s work, they are using their resources to do the “heavy lifting” and taking a burden off someone else’s shoulders.
Thankfully, we are interdependent beings, each of us blessed with our own talents and resources. What constitutes “heavy lifting” to one, can be accomplished easily and skillfully by another. This interdependence is part of the beauty of our connectedness. So the next time you extend a helping hand to serve another, you can smile and think to yourself: “Just leave the heavy lifting to me!”