Release...............................................

      So when we cry out Help, or whisper it into our chests, we enter the paradox of not going limp and not feeling so hopeless that we can barely walk, and we release ourselves from the absolute craziness of trying to be our own - or other people's - higher power.
      Help.
      We can be freed from a damaging insistence on forward thrust, from a commitment to running wildly down a convenient path that might actually be taking us deeper into the dark forest.  Praying "Help" means that we ask that Something give us the courage to stop in our tracks, right where we are, and turn our fixation away from the Gordian knot of our problems.  We stop peering and instead turn our eyes to something else:  to our feet on the sidewalk, to the middle distance, to the hills, whence our help comes - someplace else, anything else.  Maybe this is a shift of only eight degrees, but it can be a miracle.
      It may be one of those miracles where your heart sinks, because you think it means you have lost.  But in surrender you have won.  And if it were me, after a moment, I would say, Thanks.
-Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow:  The Three Essential Prayers