Ever year that I was a Cub Scout Leader for my son we would visit the Oregon Food Bank. The first year we bagged uncooked beans. The second year we boxed cans of food. The third year we sacked pears. The fourth year, beans again. The fifth year, noodles. I love doing this kind of mind-numbing, pseudo-physical work because it’s easy and it’s a way to give back to society. Every year, at the end, they announce how many pounds of food were bagged/boxed and how many families that will feed for however long. It makes you feel good, both as a person doing a good deed, and as a group, because collectively you effected a lot of families.
The Oregon Food Bank get’s most of their volunteers around the holiday season. Similarly, most charities seem to get the vast majority of their help around the holiday season. I actually find nothing wrong with this. If you’re going to start, who cares when you start? Just start. The problem is that most people treat altruism as an event in their life and not as a theme of their lives. Unless we give of ourselves on an ongoing basis, we’re just playing around when it suits us.
So where shall we begin? I propose that we commit to:
- do something good
- do something good often
“The world is not as it is. The world is as we make it.”
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