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Life

How Far?

4 October 2026 6 min read

A man’s name comes up on your phone and you think, I should check on him. You open the chat. You type How far? — two words, nothing in them, the cheapest thing you will do all week. Then you look at it sitting there and you put the phone down. You have not spoken in four months. A sudden how far now looks like you heard something.

He is doing this about you on a different evening, with the same two words, and putting his phone down for the same reason.

That is the whole thing. And I do not think the cost of it sits where people assume. It is not mainly that we suffer quietly, although we do. It is that we get almost no practice at two moves which are really one move seen from either end: asking for help, and asking whether somebody needs it.

We even have a phrase for the kind of man this produces. One man mopol. The mobile police arrive when a situation needs force, and they arrive as a unit, in a truck. A one man mopol turns up alone and still expects to handle whatever is there. It is said admiringly. It is also, for a lot of us, just how we were raised: carry it, do not announce it, come back when it is sorted.

Watch how the asking fails, because it fails politely.

Four steps that lead back to their own beginning: he looks fine, so nobody asks, so he never says it, so he still looks fine, and the loop starts again. A return arrow runs from the last step back up to the first. Nobody in it is doing anything unkind, which is exactly why it holds.He looks fine — nothing in how he carries himself says otherwiseHe looks finenothing in how he carries himself says otherwiseSo nobody asks — it would feel like an intrusion, or a bit ridiculousSo nobody asksit would feel like an intrusion, or a bit ridiculousSo he never says it — nobody opened the door, and he will not kick it inSo he never says itnobody opened the door, and he will not kick it inSo he still looks fine — and the loop starts again on MondaySo he still looks fineand the loop starts again on Mondayand round again
Nobody in that loop is doing anything unkind. Every step is reasonable on its own, which is what makes it so hard to break from the inside — and why it usually takes somebody asking a question they were not certain they had the right to ask.

Nobody in that loop is being unkind. The man looks fine, so asking feels like an intrusion — or worse, slightly ridiculous, as though you were implying something. And he will not raise it unprompted, because raising it unprompted is the one thing the training specifically removed. So the two of you stand there being considerate at each other, and nothing moves.

I notice the same gap in myself from the asking side, and it has a particular shape. It is not that I cannot ask. It is that I will do an enormous amount of work to arrive at a position where I no longer need to. I will spend three weeks acquiring something somebody could have told me in twenty minutes, and I will quietly count the three weeks as diligence. It is not diligence. It is avoidance with a good work ethic.

What is actually missing is a shape of relationship, and I think this is the part worth naming plainly. Most of the relationships available to an African man are vertical. There is the person you report to, the person who mentors you, the elder, the oga, the one you are senior to and must not look uncertain in front of. Vertical relationships are useful and I would not give mine up. But a vertical relationship cannot carry I do not know what I am doing. The sentence costs too much in either direction — upward it reads as incompetence, downward it reads as instability.

The connection that carries it is horizontal. Peer level. Someone who is roughly where you are, who gains nothing from your performance and loses nothing from your doubt. Those are rare among us, and the few I have are the reason several things in my life did not go badly. Ask Him to Come Too is the same point in a much older story: a group of trainees saw a problem and their one good decision was refusing to go and solve it by themselves. And What Samuel Couldn’t Do Alone is the smaller version — a boy who heard something real and still needed somebody else in the room to tell him what he was hearing.

Life is hard without the leverage of good people. I wrote that down years ago as a warning about driving them away through ego or carelessness. I now think the more common way to lose them is quieter than that. You simply never give them anything to hold, and after enough years of that there is nothing left between you to carry weight.

Now the part I have to be honest about, because I have argued the other side of this in public and I am not going to pretend I did not. I have written that nobody is coming to pull your rope for you, and that a safety net underneath a man is often the reason he never reaches the point where it has to work. I still believe that — it is in The Last Line of Defence and I would not take a word of it back.

But deciding that something must work is not the same as deciding you must be alone while it does. One is about effort and the other is about isolation, and we have been quietly treating them as the same instruction. You can be the last line of defence and still ask a question. The rope is yours to pull. Nobody said you cannot ask how the rope is meant to be held.

So, practically, both halves.

On offering. “Let me know if you need anything” is not an offer. It is a transfer of the burden — now he has to identify the need, judge whether it qualifies, and come and ask you for it, which is the exact sequence he is bad at. Offer something specific that he only has to accept or decline. I am free Thursday evening, can I call? I am sending you this contact, use it or don’t. And ask a question that cannot be answered with “fine”. Not how are you. Try how far with the thing you were dealing with in August, which proves you were listening and gives him somewhere specific to land.

On asking. Name one thing, to one person. Not a general confession of how hard the year has been — most of us would rather die, and a general confession also gives the other person nothing to actually do. One thing. One person. Something they can say yes or no to by Friday. Four Minutes to Get Help is about how little time people often have to reach for what matters, and how much of that time goes on deciding whether they are allowed to.

And it is worth being plain about what this actually builds, because it is not only relief for one man on one bad week. Both of these are loops. The difference is that the first one comes back to exactly where it started, and the second never does.

A spiral running clockwise and widening as it goes, carrying four steps. One, offer before he asks — something specific, such as I am free Thursday, can I call. Two, answer honestly when somebody asks you, rather than saying you are fine. Three, ask one person for one thing, answerable by Friday. Four, now you go first for somebody else. It comes back round to the same four steps, wider each time, because every round costs the next man less.Offer before he asks — “I’m free Thursday — can I call?”1Offer before he asks“I’m free Thursday — can I call?”Answer honestly — when asked, not “I’m fine”2Answer honestlywhen asked, not “I’m fine”Ask for one thing — from one person, answerable by Friday3Ask for one thingfrom one person, answerable by FridayNow you go first — for somebody else4Now you go firstfor somebody elsesame four steps,wider every round
Nobody has to be generous twice. One person goes first, once, and every round after that costs the next man less — which is what a community is, practically speaking.

Nothing in it asks anybody to be generous twice. It asks one person to go first, once, and the whole value is in what that does to the price for everybody after him. A community is not really a group of people who like each other. It is a group where asking has become cheap, and cheap asking is the thing that compounds — the man who needs something in March benefits from a question somebody was brave enough to ask in October.

I do not think we need a movement for this. I think we need a few more rooms where a man can say the true version of how it is going without it costing him anything, and a few more of us willing to ask the question first, badly, before we are sure we have the right to.

And the same question pointed outward — not waiting to be asked at all, but going looking for the person who cannot ask — is Is There Anyone?

Somebody has to go first, and it is easier to be the one who asks than the one who admits. That is the cheaper end to hold, and most of us can hold it this week.