Previous month:
December 2021
Next month:
February 2022

Posts from January 2022

Contemplating Volunteering

 

MLK Day 2022 Painting Front Door
Painting a front door on MLK Day 2022 (Photo: Jewish Federation of PBC)

 

Over the years, I’ve volunteered with different organizations, doing different things, for different reasons. I’ve filled bags with food, cleaned a beach, canvassed for politicians, sat with people in hospice, and translated Holocaust survivor testimonies. This week, I’ll start volunteering at a local public garden and continue helping to write fundraising materials for two organizations in Israel focused on coexistence. My retirement days are not just filled with reading and wandering.

You’ve likely heard the statement that the giver gets more than the receiver, but I will buck the trend and say that I don’t agree with it. It must be more of a balance. How can you say that my peace of mind for having done something good for two hours is the same as a parent receiving food for their hungry children, or a dying person having someone sit beside them for part of their endless day? If it were true, then I would need to feel guilty that part of the reason I do these acts is for me to meet people and be engaged. It’s not purely an altruistic move and I don’t want to feel bad about that.

My volunteering really started when I became an empty nester, since I had more time and less financial stress. It was a sign that I had transitioned from survival mode to fulfillment mode. It occurs to me now, though, that just when I no longer needed to focus on someone else, I chose to continue focusing on others, which, I also realize, is my way of taking care of what I need, both morally (Jewishly) and psychologically. It seems to be impossible for me to be in this world and not try to be a part of it, to help improve it, to ameliorate its pains in the ways that I am able, even while trying to make friends.

During my on-boarding interview at the garden, the interviewer asked me if I had volunteered anywhere else. I quickly mentioned a few places, but later in the interview and the day, I remembered other places. All of them had been for causes that are meaningful to me. But at most of the places, for various reasons, I hadn’t become engaged with the activity or the people with whom I worked. It seems that finding a good volunteer fit is like finding the right job or partner.

At an organization that helps abused women where I volunteered a few years ago, the woman who ran the volunteer training program had started out as a volunteer and was so dedicated that she ended up as a full-time employee. For me, it wasn’t the right fit and I only volunteered there the minimum required following the (excellent) training. At other places, I could just sign up for a few hours. In many places, there was either too little engagement or too many people coming in groups that resulted in my feeling left out. This shouldn’t be a concern and maybe it sounds selfish, and maybe it is, but I don’t want to feel bad about myself or uncomfortable when I’m trying to be of service to others. I have also realized that I would prefer to use my skills, which utilize my very being, then simply do a task. I haven’t ruled those out, but they would be more occasional than ongoing.

While some of these volunteer adventures have been frustrating, I have remained persistent, knowing that I need them and knowing that when it is the right fit, I have felt whole—as a part of what is. As I sit here pushing this thought, wondering why this has been so important to me, Hillel’s statement of ancient wisdom comes to me:

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

And me as a human being—not the women who needs to understand everything—knows that the answer is simply that this is the way for me to be in the world, to share in the world. It is to know something intrinsically. It is to be.


Wandering as My State of Being

Lake Worth Pink House
Lake Worth, Pink House

As I sit here in a local coffee shop, staring into space and at the people sitting at their tables and walking by, I realize that wandering, mentally and physically, is my natural state of being. Of course, that is a paradox, for how can I be unfocused and have an insight at the same time? Which is, I also realize, the normal state of my mind: to be aimless and purposeful, to be suspended within myself and part of the external environment.

Growing up, I lived about a mile from Little Neck Bay in Queens. As soon as I was old enough to physically wander off on my own, I would walk through my neighborhood of six-story red brick apartment buildings and two-story garden apartments to the bay, then walk along it focused on the water, the cattails growing tall, the birds seeking sustenance, and other people walking, skating, or biking on the paved path, while trying to ignore the busy highway on the other side, pretending that the rushing sounds of the cars were waves coming in and going out rhythmically.

When I could drive, sometimes I went to Jones Beach where I would walk along the wide sandy beach, the wind and the waves my walking partners. The hour drive was prologue and epilogue to the walk, cocooning me within the car. Other times, I would go in the opposite direction: into Manhattan. There, I would walk for miles, often on Fifth Avenue along Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and then in the museum through gallery after gallery of people and beauty and other people’s insights. Sometimes I would walk up Madison Avenue, walking by shops that I would never enter, and down the streets between looking at the brownstones where people lived in luxury that I could only daydream about. Then, to Third Avenue where there was more vibrancy, less preciousness, more of a sense of belonging, and back to the subway on sturdy Lexington Avenue.

Over the years, wherever I lived I had “my walks” where I would wander and wonder. In Israel, it was in Tel Aviv along the gentle Mediterranean Sea as well as Europeanesque Rothschild Boulevard, with its greenway, a whole world in the middle of the street, and the area’s low white buildings evocative of hope and purpose, where I always felt like a tourist and a resident. In Virginia, it was along the Potomac River in River Bend Park with Maryland right across the way, making water, for the first time, feel limited, or in Old Town Alexandria where the river was backdrop to centuries-old brick and wooden homes that forced me to think back in history. Now, here, in Florida, I walk along the Atlantic Ocean easily walking for miles in the space where water and sand meet, sometimes soaking ankles, calves, rolled-up-pants, from the occasional big wave, or in local parks watching wading birds and the too prevalent invasive iguanas. The quaint cottages in Lake Worth’s historic districts give me the created environment I need to be a counterpoint to the natural one, answering different needs of my wandering mind.  

The walking—thinking, moving, observing—being active and passive simultaneously—has been a key experience for me. Since I am alone on these walks, untethered to conversation and someone else’s impressions, I remain separate, as an artist re/creating a scene. Fundamentally, I realize, this is not “what I do,” rather “who I am.” My state of equilibrium. These walks enable the being, the writing.

For a while I listened to music and podcasts when I walked. I don’t anymore. Concern for ruining my hearing is one reason, but also those other voices in my head infringed upon my own voice from stirring around the random and developing thoughts. These walks have been an opportunity to lead within my own mind, to not be led or directed. My safe space out in the world.

Lake Worth Hiding House
Lake Worth, Hiding House

Being Adventurous

Breakfast view
Breakfast View
I’m still troubled by something that younger daughter said to me a few years ago. She told me that I wasn’t adventurous. Mind you, she said this on our trip to New York City where she expected me to decide on all activities and dining establishments, even though I haven’t lived there since 1995, when I was pregnant with her, worked full-time, and was the mother of a preschooler. Still, it has stuck with me in a way that someone else’s truth infringes upon one’s own imaginings.

My immediate reaction was to remind her that I had moved from New York to Israel on my own when I was 21. This, surely, rated as adventurous, I said. She practically yawned when she replied how long ago that was. I could have added that we had moved from Israel to Virginia for my high-tech job, that I went to graduate school in my 40s, changed careers, and divorced her father with a tenacity that surely rated as a different kind of daring, but all she saw was that I was a teacher who taught the same thing year after year. Since then, I think about her blunt assessment when I consider if I am hesitant to do something new because I honestly don’t want to do it, or if the hesitation is in actually doing something new.

Mind you (and I should have thought of this when she made her pronouncement), the degree to which I have been adventurous should be compared to the degree to which I was exposed to that quality in my childhood—of which there was practically none. My parents lived in the apartment they moved to when my mother was pregnant with me until she moved to Florida a few years after my father passed away, which means that she lived there for over 50 years. And even the apartment where I live with her now was a bequest from her aunt. Clearly, I see moving as an indicator of adventure or change.

Since I graduated from college 40 years ago, I’ve had a number of jobs and two careers; I lived in three states, two countries and quite a few homes; and I even got citizenship for another country (Israel). But what she focused on was that I had stayed for a long time in one school and position—and it would have been the same classroom if we hadn’t undergone a renovation. For me, I didn’t see that as being stuck, probably because I never imagined that I would be a teacher, so the career itself—even my daily entry into my classroom—was always a bit of an adventure.

Nevertheless, it’s unsettling to think that I am perceived as lacking in a certain oomph, because that’s not how I perceive myself. It has become important to me, especially since retiring (and I would say that retiring at 60 requires a bit of jumping into the unknown) that I act on my perception of myself as dynamic, and not just think that I am.

Which brings me to dog-watching and dog-sitting, which I did recently. It was completely new for me, entailing trying a new job, entering the gig economy, meeting new people and becoming comfortable in their homes, and testing my identity as a dog person. It also meant that I pushed myself past the parameters of my day that I had quickly gotten used to.

After two jobs in two weeks, I realized that I liked the dog-sitting, which was ostensibly a sleepover with the dogs in their home, but not the dog-walking, where I had to go over to the dog’s house three times a day to walk him and take care of him and his cat sibling. What I didn’t like about that was that I lost my sense of freedom. I had become tied to the clock and an external schedule, making it feel like an imposition—like a job. I quickly changed my profile on the dog-walking app to only show that I dog-sit. The immediate lesson here was that it’s good to try new things, but not to commit to them just because they’re new.

As I sit here writing, I’m watching a woman attempt to hit a golf ball. (The apartment is on a golf course, so during the day I watch golfers swing, golf carts roam, and hear the whack of club on ball.) She is terrible. I will be generous and assume that she’s trying a new sport. Her way of being adventurous, perhaps, as I was in trying pickleball.

I wonder, as I watch the steady stream of golfers on this beautiful winter day, about trying new things. What does it mean to be adventurous to me now? Does it have to be big things, like a new job or home or international travel? Can it be in little things, like new local beaches and restaurants and even recipes. What makes me feel that I’m pushing myself? As a single woman, sometimes just stepping out of the house feels like embarking on a grand adventure, since there’s no one to rely on or with whom to share the experience.

It finally occurs to me that what matters is that I am comfortable with myself, that I believe in myself as an entire world. I don’t need to get lost in a foreign city or figure out new colleagues and neighbors to feel alive. Just because I’m still doesn’t mean that I need to overturn things to know that I’m not settling into dullness. I see now, for who I am now, that to be with wonder and anticipation, to know that each moment is never the same, is to be adventurous.

Lunch View
Lunch View