Tag Archives: living fully

Oh, I’m Just a Volunteer …

Every time I hear someone say “I’m just a volunteer,” I feel like pulling that person aside for a pep talk.  Like ‘just a housewife’ which once kept women in their so-called place, this phrase speaks of self-sacrifice and low status.  It has no place in the reality of what community service is and could become in the 21st century.  One fact: U.S. Government data for 2008 show that 61.8 million Americans or 26.4 percent of the adult population contributed 8 billion hours of volunteer service worth $162 billion*.  Much harder to calculate is the impact of community service on civic life, except when one tries to imagine what life would be like without the hundreds of nonprofit organizations, foundations, faith-based charities, service clubs, and the PTA.

Possibly someone who calls herself  just a volunteer hasn’t found a fit between her skills and an organization that knows how to put them to good use.  Sure, we all gladly stuff envelopes, work the phones and canvass during a campaign, but if you regularly donate your time, you need — perhaps even more than people on the payroll – a clear sense of mission and how your efforts are helping accomplish it.  Research shows that the real challenge is retaining volunteers, one-third of whom quit after the first year.  If you are one of these folks, think again.  Whatever you have to bring to the table, there is the right match for you, and a world that badly needs your time and care.

There is much evidence that suggests we are hardwired for altruism.  Good Samaritans of all ages, shapes and sizes turn up all the time.  People risk their own lives to save someone else’s.  Why?  Because, as people committed to community service soon discover, it feels good to give.  Brian Mullaney, co-founder of Smile Train, puts it this way: “The most selfish thing you can do is to help other people.”  Children do it.  Busy people do it.  Even those of modest means and education do it.

I think of the story our UU minister told last Sunday.  On the way home from a wedding ceremony in rural New Jersey, her car broke down.  It was getting dark as she got out, dressed in high heels and long minister’s robe.  She stood by the highway, trying to flag down some help.  Many cars passed without slowing down.  Finally, an old van packed with a family of migrant workers stopped.  They made room for her and drove her to the nearest gas station and phone, then waited until they knew help was on its way.  “They were tired and probably hungry,” she said, “but they waited.”

I think of our eight year old granddaughter who raised $100 all by herself for the children of Haiti.  And the Cub Scout troupe our grandsons belong to, that does regular beach cleanup.  And I think of the Purpose Prize community, “individuals over age 60 who are defying societal expectations by channeling their creativity and talent to address critical social problems at the local, regional, or national level” at a time when many of their peers consider their work and their best years behind them.

Community service is contagious when we take pride in what we do.  And we should, no matter how lowly the task may seem.  Serving helps you connect with other people; it encourages you to learn things you didn’t know, even about your own capacities; you feel a part of something bigger; you feel needed, depended upon, valuable. Sometimes it opens doors to a new career, friends, a mate.  So doing the right thing by others is ‘selfish’ because, as all the wisdom traditions teach, we are one.  The people who really need a pep talk – or something stronger – are the ones who saw a woman stuck beside her car on a highway, and just kept right on driving.

More resources:

AARP Create the Good

Idealist

The Purpose Prize

Volunteering in America

Volunteer Match

*Using Independent Sector’s 2008 estimate of the dollar value of a volunteer hour ($20.25).

The Deadly Comfort Zone

Singer and songwriter, Paul Simon has a line in his wonderful poem set to music, American Tune, that has always resonated with me. “For we’ve lived so well, so long…” it goes, and later in another verse, he cautions, “…you can’t be forever blessed.”  We have been blessed here,  in the safe, secure, wealthy nations of the developed world.  And as we grow older, it seems that we have also been lulled to sleep, cradled in our comfort zones, dead to the world.

What happened to our thirst to learn and discover new things we had as children?   Think about your grandchildren in their first year, taking those tentative steps, wanting to touch, taste, smell everything.  We were all like that once.  Then, gradually, without our noticing, we started craving something else — safety, security, the known world — even to the point of shrinking our aspirations to fit into what was comfortable, predictable, easy.  In the process, we have sacrificed resilience and resourcefulness, the ability to adapt to changing circumstances upon which our survival as a species depended.  We gave up, and opted for ‘assisted living’ long before our time (if there is ever a time).

Even if you recognize some part of yourself here, the situation is reversible.  True, the bell tolls for us all.  But in the meantime, what is there to stop us from making the most of the ‘life we are given‘ to borrow from a title of a wonderful book by George Leonard and Michael Murphy, pioneers of the human potential movement and founders of Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California.

Published in 1995, this workbook for Leonard and Murphy’s Intergral Transformative Practice, remains a prototype, indeed a classic, of the self-help genre.  It weaves together proven practices: exercise, diet, daily affirmations, and community, into a program that is both rigorous and enjoyable.  (ITP groups continue to form today).  Here’s a quote from novelist, James Agee, that sets the book’s tone: “I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his ‘limits,’ of fully ‘realizing’ his potentialities; that … his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself.”

Is waking up hard to do?  Perhaps.  But clinging to the deadly comfort zone is a far worse choice.  Conclude Leonard and Murphy: “We believe that by the very nature of things, each of us carries a spark of divinity in every cell and that we have the potential to manifest powers of body, mind, heart, and soul beyond our present ability to imagine. We believe that a society could find no better primary intention, no more appropriate compass course for its programs and policies, than the realization of every citizen’s positive potential.”  Amen.  And go for it!

More information:

Excerpt from The Life We Are Given
Integral Transformative Practice Workshops
Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California

World Cafe – a conversational process for breakthrough thinking.

Institute of Noetic Sciences


Six Million…

seems an impressive figure (about 2% of the U.S. adult population), but Randy Pausch, the 47-year-old Carnegie-Mellon professor who is dying of pancreatic cancer, deserves a bigger audience for his Last Lecture, created as a legacy for his young children. So, we’re doing our bit to get more people to tune in. (Here’s Randy’s website that contains all the links to his various appearances, and translations in Chinese (yes!).

Published in April, The Last Lecture is #3 on Amazon and prominently displayed at airport book stores (I saw it in Chicago and Denver last week). Co-author Jeffrey Zaslow’s report in the Encore section of the Wall Street Journal is a fine preview. This is the Tuesdays with Morrie of this decade, and its success is evidence that many of us are eager to read messages about making the most of every moment of life, from someone on the verge of losing it all. The important question is: what do we do next?

Update: Randy Pausch died July 25, 2008.  Here is more about his life.