Society needs us more than ever.
It needs people to stand up and to lean in, to reach out a hand to help other people for the sake of helping and nothing else.
Long ago, decades ago, in another millennium, I arrived at the hospital in Nottingham.
I was 23 years old, fresh-faced??, naive, inexperienced, overconfident, terrified, lonely.
I met a mentor who looked after me, who showed me the ways, and helped me to fit in and eventually to stay here for decades longer than I would have ever done without them.
One of the things I learned was in the middle of the night, when I was stitching people up, and often stitching people up who had been involved in a fight, and sometimes people who were involved in a fight with the person in the next cubicle, whom I was expected to then go and stitch up again. I found it hard to believe that I was doing a good thing, doing the right thing, making a difference.
What my mentor told me in a moment of epiphany, like a blinding flash of light, is that I wasn't helping them for them, I was helping them for me.
It was the pride in what I was doing without reward, which was the reward in itself.
That's what volunteering is.
That's what stepping up is.
That's what helping out in society, giving something back to something greater than yourself, is.
If you expect that you are helping someone else, and therefore you will get the gratitude and the light shone on you for that, then you're missing the point.
It is for the satisfaction of what you've done, a job done well for the sake of doing a job well, and for nothing else.
For one reason or another, I have volunteered my time over the past 3 decades in lots of different directions, not because I thought I'd be given great credit for it, but just because I thought I would be given great credit for it, not just because I thought it was the right thing to do, because people had done that for me.
One of the areas in which I did this was boys' football.
At the very start of it, when my son was involved, I was asked if I would coach. I had never been a football coach before, and I am unlikely ever to be again, because it would help my son, and because I felt it was the right thing to do. I said yes.
We were not an extraordinarily gifted team.
We were in division 8 out of 8, but over time, because we turned up, and we tried to do things that we felt were the right way, we progressed from 7 to 6 and 5. We won the cup twice, and we ended up so close to Division One, right on the cusp at the very end.
Over that time, I helped other people run their teams too, just because they needed the help, and sometimes they helped me, but last Friday, when my son finished school for the very last time, I went to the pub for half an hour to see him and his friends, just to say hi.
There were many of the boys that I had coached during my time. I saw them, and we talked, and I was sad that it was finished, not because I'll never do it again, but because it was the right thing to do, because we shared stuff that was great (and more often than not terrible).
It was a privilege, but it was for me, not for them; it made me feel good, but the funny thing is that in return it seemed to help a lot of other people too, as if by a side effect.
Blog Post Number - 4538