not being sainted...just yet
I spent a few hours last week with my two boys working in one of the many local food banks. Mixed emotions for the day. You feel great in offering, you feel amazing in knowing that something you are doing with your time might actually directly help someone in need, but in the end you realize that we as a society need to step up to the plate with food banks and our helping of the underprivileged.This is our second year with the food bank. I won’t take credit and say it’s my own idea, in fact it’s my bosses idea, and we as a department use the afternoon as our Christmas party/celebration. The company makes a donation to the food bank, and we as a group go out afterward for food and drink.
The event is simple. It’s the employees and their children (basically the children are the ones aged 6-16 only), we spend about 2-3 hours in the food bank, breaking down boxes, packaging, stocking shelves, cleaning, whatever it is they need us to do.
At the end of the day, one of the employees handed each of the 6 kids in attendance a pack of gum as a thank you and we as a team headed to a posh pool hall and ate and drank.
Therein lies the rub for me.
I appreciate this day tremendously. I love that my kids have their eyes opened to a world we try so hard to shelter them from even if it is for 3 hours a year. I love that in some way we as a family, we as a department, we as a company, we as citizens will somehow make a small but important impact on the lives of a few people who desperately need our help. It’s hugely important and generally overlooked by our society of have’s.
What befuddles me is that as we complete this day, we sit with our beers and canapés, and chat about our lives, share our gift ideas, and how we’re “spoiling” little Johnny or Julie this year and generally we just lose the thoughts that we had mere hour or so ago.
Again, I don’t want to overshadow this event. The whole department looks forward to it for a year – we plan it we do it, we feel great about it….it’s the best and most anticipated annual event we have. I just get confused and remorseful afterward. We do all this work, then we celebrate. I wouldn’t change a thing, but I do and probably always will feel confused by how the day is divided into two sets of feelings.
In the end it isn’t an event like this that defines whether your elevator goes up or down after your death….It’s your entire body of work of course, but moments like this could do a lot in terms of guiding you to your resting place, and it just seems that it’s a wash at day’s end, we do good and then we counteract it off by doing the norm.
posted by G.M. Shier @ Monday, December 07, 2009
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