The offer of help

In Alexandria, a man in his sixties runs a small electronics repair shop that has been losing customers for years. His nephew, who sells things online for a living, stops by one afternoon and asks the obvious question. How can I help?

It should be a welcome question. Often it is not.

Part of the trouble is that being stuck has its own comfort. The uncle knows the shape of his decline. It is familiar, and in a strange way it is settled. Help would mean hope, and hope is unsettled. It reopens a question he had stopped asking.

Part of it is that imagining help makes it real. If he describes what a better shop would look like, he is one step closer to having to try, and trying again is frightening at his age.

Part of it is history. Others have offered before. A friend who promised to set up a page and never did. A supplier who wanted to help mostly himself. The uncle has learned that offers tend to be brief and that the people making them tend to leave.

And part of it is that the problem has become very complete. Every suggestion has an answer ready. The street is wrong, the customers have changed, the young only buy new. Each of those is true enough, and together they make a wall that no single idea can get past.

None of this means the nephew is wrong to ask. It means he should expect the question to be met with resistance, and not take it personally.

Then, instead of waiting for permission, he can do something small. Photograph ten repaired radios. Post them. See whether anyone calls.

Whether help is possible is not something either of them can settle by talking. They only find out by trying.