IF SOMEONE ELSE CARRIES YOU UP, CAN YOU CLIMB DOWN ON YOUR OWN?
When we are children, we do not realize that some of the words our mothers and fathers say to us will, years later, become sentences that describe our lives.
One of Ali Shariati’s childhood memories tells of a little boy who wanted to climb a tree and asked his mother for help. She told him that if someone else helped him climb up, he would not be able to climb down on his own.
I do not know how much he understood the meaning of those words as a child. But apparently, Shariati never forgot them. Some words reveal their true value only after many years have passed.
Life, too, is a little like climbing a tree.
Sometimes, we rise with the help of someone else. A friend supports us, a teacher shows us the way, our family opens doors for us, or someone gives us an opportunity. There is nothing shameful about any of this. We grow and become stronger with the support of others.
The real problem begins when we start believing that the place we reached with someone else’s help was reached entirely by our own strength.
Because if we do not know what to do when that support is withdrawn, then we have not truly risen; we have simply been carried for a while.
What matters in life is not merely climbing higher. It is being able to stand on your own feet once you get there.
A person’s true strength is not measured by who supported them, but by what they can do when that support is no longer there.
As my late friend Doğan Cüceloğlu often emphasized, when raising children, we should teach them not only how to accept help, but also how to walk on their own when that help is no longer available.
The role of a parent, teacher, leader, or friend is not to carry a person throughout life. The real task is to raise someone strong enough to let go of their hand when the time comes.
Because an outstretched hand cannot always save us.
Sometimes the greatest help is withdrawing that hand and allowing a person to stand on their own feet.
As children, we may need someone’s hand to help us climb a tree.
But at some point in life, everyone faces the same question:
“Who brought you up here?”
The real question is:
“Can you climb down on your own now?”
A person can rise with the help of others.
But they cannot live by placing their life entirely in someone else’s hands.
Because true freedom begins the day we stop relying on the hand that lifted us up and start trusting our own feet.