Saturday, November 9, 2013
Volunteering: The Missing Link In My Early Retirement
Some months back Suzanne over at Life Out Loud challenged her blog readers to categorize how they spent their time each day in order to see what was really being given priority. In my case, I was able to categorize most of my actions as being related to one of the following areas of priority:
Mind
Body
Spirit
Travel
Family
Friends
At the risk of exposing my less-than-perfect self, I have to point out that the one glaring omission in the above list was Volunteering. In spite of having done much volunteering over the years in the organizations and groups my daughters were involved in, I'd stalled out at some point over the last decade as my job scope grew, and more of my energy got redirected toward it as a result.
So when I entered retirement in 2011, I did so with the best of intentions to volunteer, even undergoing several weeks of training beforehand with two different organizations, to be sure I had something to step into immediately. To my surprise, however, I very quickly began to resent these intrusions into my newly discovered free time, and ultimately decided I simply wasn't ready to commit my time to anything other than myself just yet.
Recently however, some two and a half years post retirement, a little kernel of wanting to give back has began to grow. As I mulled over what that meant, I knew whatever it ultimately turned out to be would have to both strike a chord of passion, and be able to be compartmentalized into the six months we weren't traveling. Something involving our semester-by-semester Lifelong Learning program (OLLI) seemed to be the obvious answer, but what to do exactly?
I knew I wanted to teach, having enjoyed teaching product and sales processes in my prior occupation, but teach what exactly? The problem with our Lifelong Learning program is that there are a lot of very smart people in it, like doctor, lawyer, judge, engineer and scientist smart, and I struggled to figure out what I could possibly offer that would have value.
My first step was to begin attending committee meetings in a variety of areas to see what struck a chord. The first few didn't feel quite right for a variety of reasons, but when I sat down at my first Computer Education committee meeting I knew I'd come home. That first meeting was just like the many IT meetings I attending during my working years, but for a much better cause than simply increasing revenue - the goal here was to enhance peoples' lives by helping to improve computer skills in areas that were important, personally, to them.
I really enjoy computers. I enjoy staying up to date on technology, and am a heavy user of Microsoft products, Adobe products, Google docs, social media and social networking. When I mentioned this to the computer education committee as part of my introduction, I received much encouragement to consider offering a class on one of the last two, which is how an OLLI course in Social Media 101 was born.
The class kicked off last week, and to say I was nervous would be an understatement. What if no one showed up? What if I discovered I didn't know as much as I thought I knew about Social Media?
To my surprise, the class was standing room only at the designated start time. It turned out that there are a lot of older individuals that feel shut out of their family's lives because of their family's heavy usage of a medium they don't yet really understand. As a result, I'm finding it so rewarding to disassemble and explain step by step how to use sites like Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook to establish closer family connections, and possibly enhance their lives in other ways as well by bringing them closer to friends, and even causes, they care about. Their enthusiasm in return has been so wonderful, and so rewarding, that I returned home determined to figure out how to bring even more interesting stuff to them going forward. One woman, in particular, touched my heart as she tearfully explained how isolated she had previously felt at not being able to understand how to utilize Social Media to view her far-away daughter's frequent video and photo postings of her young grandchildren.
My involvement in the program will expand next semester to include a class on Microsoft Word, which I'll be teaching in conjunction with a Life Storybook course that focuses on helping OLLI members write their life stories. I'm looking forward to lending technical assistance to those interested in learning how to present their stories in an aesthetically pleasing manner that can then be electronically shared or printed for the purpose of preserving and passing them down to future generations.
In the meantime, I'm working one-on-one with a gentleman that is trying to document his life story while clearly beginning to lose his mental cabilities. I can tell from the document he is working to transcribe, that he was a CPA previously, and to now watch him struggle to perform the simplest of computer tasks is a humbling reminder of what the aging process can do. And yet, every Friday he's waiting for me with the biggest of smiles, and the most appreciate of attitudes. If he only knew that I'm walking away with far more than I could possibly be hoping to leave him with.
And while I understand that none of these things are going to change the world significantly in and of themselves, I'd like to think that they are significantly meaningful to the individuals being affected. For now, that's more than good enough for this early retiree.
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