The Gift of Volunteering

I believe that the thing that has changed my life the most over the last few years has been the volunteering work my family undertakes at a local end-of-life residential care home. Last week I made that statement to someone, and his response, reasonably enough, was “How?” I mumbled something about becoming more mellow. But then I thought I should try to formulate a better answer for myself, because, if it is true, I ought to be able to understand why and how and maybe to extract other useful lessons.

Four years ago our local mass was visited by a couple of nuns, one of whom made a quirky speech, seeking volunteers. Sister Elizabeth Ann was far from polished, but was utterly charming, and we were intrigued. There it would have ended, but a few months later my wife called them up and the family ended up visiting the facility one Saturday morning to learn more and for some training. When the nun tasked with explaining how to work a wheelchair turned out to be seventy-five and appearing to be not far short of needing such a chair for herself, we were hooked.

Queen of Peace is a residential old folks home near the Queens-Nassau border run by some nuns from an order called the Little Sisters of the Poor. It is a big facility, with a seminary in one building and accommodation for 100 residents and 20 nuns in another building, one that also houses a beautiful chapel, and common facilities like dining rooms.

The residents range from 80-110 and tend to progress through the floors. Some have lived there for twenty years, but others die only months after admission. The fourth and fifth floors comprise apartments where residents live quite independently. On the second floor the level of care becomes higher and those residents have meals served to them. The third floor has the highest level of care and oversight. Residents are not required to be Catholic, but those that are (and some that aren’t) can join the nuns at daily mass. When a resident is close to death, nuns form a bedside vigil. Many residential nuns are also quite elderly, but others are younger, and the novices from the seminary appear and offer extra energy on occasion. There are medical and service employees, and also some volunteers.

We show up every Saturday evening when we are free to help serving the evening meal to second floor residents. When they were with us, the kids did the same for the third floor: seemingly the weaker residents benefit the most from having young folk around them. In truth, the nuns and staff could serve the meals quite easily without us, and our role is partly to help but mainly to offer conversation and friendship. Over the years we have got to know many residents well and they look forward to our visits. After dinner, we visit the old friends who have moved up from floor two to floor three. Then once per week I show up to cantor the daily mass, and I am also on a list of volunteers available to act as drivers, usually ferrying residents to and from medical appointments. We try to show up on days when they might be short of volunteers and the old folk need cheering up, such as New Year’s Eve. Finally, one of our choirs performs a free concert for the residents each year.

So how has this rather humdrum activity changed our lives so much? The evidence that it has mainly comes from our moods. We look forward to each visit and are sad when we have to miss a Saturday. While there, stress seems to vanish and we become more peaceful and serene. We always talk fondly after every visit, not just on the way home but sometimes for days afterwards. We often refer to residents in general conversation, some alive and some now dead, and always with fondness. All those thoughts and conversations feel kinder and gentler than other interactions.

What is the secret sauce in Queen of Peace that makes those good things happen? There are several contributing elements and a few common themes.

Some of the experiences make us calmer and better people. There is something humble and generous about serving. We are not looking for accolades, it is simply calming and a joy to see gratitude on faces. Everything happens at a slow pace as well, something that helps to remove stress and build patience. There is plenty of gentle humour and humility too. Most residents are deaf and that makes them speak more loudly then they are aware, so often I will serve a table, leave, and hear a loud conversation afterwards, sometimes along the lines of how “that guy” has no idea how to make a good sandwich or some other failing.

Talking with the old folk also has many valuable lessons. One is not to judge based on appearances. Many residents are severely disabled physically but are still sharp mentally (and some the opposite), and it is a good reminder that everyone has an interesting story and warrants our respect. A lot of wisdom comes from those old mouths. I have a bad habit of stopping listening to people when bored or distracted, and serving at the home has reduced that. It is also a good exercise in finding something to say, in accepting people as they are, and in being cheerful and positive. Another benefit is becoming comfortable with disability – I used to avoid eye contact with such folk and even to shiver internally; now I can engage openly, which is usually what disabled people want.

Another theme is acceptance of decline, pain, and ultimately death. It is sometimes tough for the residents to accept that, for example, they need to transition from a walker to a wheelchair, and life can seem to become a series of small defeats to them. But the nuns help them through it with kindness. Actually, kindness permeates among the residents. One old bird was a curmudgeon when she first arrived, but some of the grace of her new friends and the nuns has rubbed off on her. Seeing this gives us hope and joy. Then, as death nears, the nuns help them prepare, so that often the end is not a source of fear or misery but more of a gentle passage. Seeing all this helps us put our own small troubles into a wider context.

Through it all the key word is love. Queen of Peace is a wonderful place full of human love. Nowadays, when one resident is sick or angry or frightened, I just try to remind them that they are surrounded by love, and often that is all that they need to hear. Perhaps that all that any of us need to hear, all the time, whatever our age or fitness or situation. Becoming a small part of that circle of love and witnessing its power maybe the greatest gift of all.

Sometimes I wonder if the magic comes from the volunteering or from the nuns. Certainly the combination is powerful, and I wonder if we would get the same sense of love and peace if, for example, we volunteered in a prison. We have started manning the food bank at our local church, and there me meet a rougher class of person and there are no nuns around to help. But somehow the magic still works. So my conclusion is that the nuns help to create something truly special at Queen of Peace, but that the service involved in any volunteering situation can offer serenity. That also fits with my experience in a twelve-step programme some years ago.

The experience at the home illustrates another truth, which is that we all tend to converge with our environments. I am sure I was at my least respectful when part of an aggressive, fear-filled business atmosphere. Luckily, most arenas that I inhabit today are much more mellow. We should not be surprised that kids growing up in deprived surroundings often fail to escape them. We should be slower to judge these people and quicker to help them.

I am not sure that my answer to the “How?” question would be much more succinct as a result of the thought behind this blog, but perhaps I can make my claim with a little more confidence than before, and feel more secure in the implied claim that volunteering can be a great gift for all of us. If I had to summarise it in a sentence, that sentence must include the word love. For love is where it all starts, and the nuns at Queen of Peace demonstrate love more than any group of people I’ve ever had the privilege to be among.

Mortality, Bucket Lists, and Perfect Weeks

The start of this year has been a time of medical procedures for me. Mainly this has been a coincidence of timing, with regular check-ups happening to fall in the same window as some self-initiated projects such as investigating hearing aids. Still, the combined effect has been to remind myself of my mortality. Every appointment or procedure has a small chance of leading to very bad news, and this tends to get into my head.

Mainly this sort of thought is rather unwelcome, but it does have some benefits. We are often reminded to live every day as if it is our last, or similar sound guidance, but we don’t often take time to really reflect on what these things imply, still less to actually do anything about it. A long spell of thoughts of mortality helps to focus the mind on what actions might be practical.

The most common outcome of such processes seems to be the production of bucket lists. I am a bit suspicious of these, partly because their existence is such a boon to commercial interests like the travel industry. It also chimes with that other trend, that of non-stop photography, instagram, and the like. But are we all seeking after fleeting highlights rather than anything more meaningful?

I think back to our visit to Machu Picchu, a staple of bucket lists. I am glad we went; the site was spectacular. But my fondness for that trip is much wider than the couple of hours peering at some ruins through clouds. It was a good week of family bonding, the Lima vibe and cuisine were great, and I also loved Cusco.

I suspect that listing bucket list experiences might miss the point. I guess I would like to see the Northern Lights. But I have seen many firework festivals and recall none of them, only instead some of their family contexts, and I am not sure about spending a fortune to spend a whole month in freezing cold places with little daylight and less to do in the hope that the Northern Lights might make a fleeting appearance that I can take pictures of.

Another one might be bird watching in the rain forest. Well actually I did that last week, on Tobago. After the second hour of trudging through mud with occasional sightings of birds that might have been rare and colourful but were still just birds, most of us would have sacrificed the remainder of the tour for a good cup of coffee. I was glad to have done it, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a life highlight.

But last week I think I stumbled upon a better approach, at least for me. The week on Tobago was a dream. It was a music week, where a group of us paid to be coached as a scratch choir by a top conductor. The location was as unspoiled as could be imagined, with no shops, a few restaurants and empty beaches. A typical day started with a two minute walk to an ocean swim then continued with breakfast, singing, coffee, more singing, lunch, siesta, sunbathe, swim, read, more singing, dinner and drinking. I turned off my mobile phone and just spent ten minutes per day on my laptop on news and e-mails. The company was excellent, full of interesting people. The music director became a close friend. Most importantly, I went with my wife, and we enjoyed hours and hours of relaxed time together.

Of course, the singing would not be for everyone. Some might have preferred a bit more development, maybe a few shops or at least a more reliable water supply. I found the temperature ideal, but it might be a bit warm for some.

But this is the point. We would all conceive a different perfect week, but I managed to find one that worked for me, and it is repeatable and even somewhat affordable. I discovered my perfect week by experiencing it, but it would not have been beyond my imagination to construct it in my mind and then make it happen.

I suggest this is a good exercise, more valuable than creating a bucket list. Then I suggest repeating it for different time periods. Maybe the bucket list could be converted into a series of perfect days. But what would comprise a perfect month, or a perfect year?

My perfect month would involve more singing and more quality time with my wife, but I would add some gentle travel, perhaps around the Spanish cathedral cities or Italian renaissance museums. More variety of cuisine would be built in – every evening meal on Tobago was lovely, but they were all more or less the same. Maybe the reading for the month would have an educational element related to the travel.

As we extend the time horizon outwards, I would have to include some regular volunteering, plenty of time with kids, especially my own, watching some live sports, and some singing projects looking for top quality performances.

Only having set down these goals in the form of perfect time periods comes the time to consider consequences and constraints. Some are obvious, notably money. Some emerge once ideas are thought through: a fifteen city European tour sounds great, until you consider the time spent in traffic snarls, security lines, or tossing and turning in unfamiliar beds. But there are others too: opportunity costs, clashing commitments, duties, and health outcomes. It may be OK to have a dream week stuffing cakes down your throat, but any longer than that might start limiting healthy life expectancy. 

But the most important consideration is relationships, notably family and especially life partner relationships. What if your dream month looks very different to that of your partner? Well, it probably will. And, like everything else in a good marriage, compromises can result. In my dream week, I know I will have to upgrade the hotel and maybe choose somewhere less warm as well.

There are so many benefits to this approach. Perhaps the most important one is the opportunity for dialogue within a partnership. Too often we just live out our lives, taking easy options, making assumptions about what others want, and then complaining afterwards. To borrow from a business idea, the urgent consumes the important. But if we are thoughtful and open about what would be ideal for each of us, that gives a great starting point. Then you can chip away at differences, as well as other annoying factors like cash and jobs and family commitments and health. The discussion can also help to shape thoughts about major life choices.

The obvious time to do this exercise is close to retirement, at a point where a major time constraint might be disappearing. It can also help to take away some of the fear of retirement. But there is every reason to carry out the exercise every few years or so at any stage of life, and whether or not you are in a life partnership.

I struck the jackpot with my week on Tobago, and can pray for many repeats, if I am right that my wife enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. We can also look forward to some wonderful months and years, duly budgeted and compromised so as to be a bit less than perfect but still great. Just the anticipation of such things is a wonderful gift.

Of course, all of this comes with the caveat of God willing, as all these medical procedures have reminded me. But that should only encourage us to dream, as at least then we have a fighting chance of realising those dreams, putting us ahead of the many who don’t get around to it and then run out of time. My advice for today is not to be one of those people. Get dreaming.

Brexit and Establishments

No sooner had I written about Brexit and lauded a Guardian Weekly article by Fintan O’Toole, than I opened my next edition of the same magazine and found another article by the same guy on the same subject, equally brilliant and thought provoking.

The central claim of the article is that Brexit is not really about Europe at all, but Britain's (and predominantly England’s) reckoning with itself. Europe is just the catalyst for that reckoning.

He makes a brilliant comparison between the recent events in parliament to the scene in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland where the dodo organizes something called a caucus-race. All the characters have descended into a vale of tears, and are urged to try to dry out by running around aimlessly in a race with no rules. After a while, the dodo cries out that the race is over, at which point everyone asks him “But who has won?”

The story also reminds me of a game that panellists play each week on a British radio show called “I’m sorry, I haven’t a clue”; amazingly, the show is still running according to Wikipedia. In that game the panellists shout out London Underground stations until one of them closes the game with the station Mornington Crescent. Those not in the know try to work out the rules of the game, whether a station needs to be connected to the one before by line or geography or alphabet or in some other way, but the truth is that there are no such rules, the stations are just chosen at random. This is a lovely example of British humour.

O’Toole finds the machinations of the British establishment over Brexit in the Dodo game. Everyone is running around, displaying enormous passion but little logic beyond a competitive hatred of the other participants, and with little prospect of a resolution. When Theresa May’s deal was roundly rejected, to the great joy of many players, one newspaper coined the term “Brextinct”, just like the dodo itself. But the reality is that the game has no real end and certainly no winner.

O’Toole claims that the root cause for all this is that Brexit is not really about Europe at all and hence won’t be resolved simply within the context of the debate about Europe. The debate is about Britain itself, the sort of country it wants to be now that it is growing up.

O’Toole quotes various unresolved questions within Britain as having been left to fester and collectively led to dysfunction. He mentions the precarious balancing act of the union of four (well, three and a half) countries, the regional inequalities epitomised by the financial City of London, resentment of immigrants, and the hollowing out and consequent incompetence of the ruling class. He could have added the royals, the Church of England, the relationship with the US, residual colonial attitudes, hangups about sex and many other factors.

I loved the analogy and analysis, but then I wondered how unique it is to England. The Irish have just as long a list themselves, starting with partition, the Church, alcohol, petty corruption as a norm, and the attitude to the English. The US has race (including native Americans, the true elephant in the room), militarism, social issues including abortion, and immigration.

Most nations have a long list of unresolved undiscussables. What may be unique to England, for now, is the presence of the catalyst, in the form of the EU. It may be only a catalyst rather than a root cause, but without a catalyst there is at least uneasy stability.

Wondering about how undiscussables work, I recalled another Brexit article from a couple of months ago, by Bagehot in the Economist. His diagnosis for the sorry state of the UK (including not just the Brexit mess but the general incompetence of current leaders), was that the establishment had fractured.

Bagehot tried to define what an establishment is. So does Wikipedia, but I found their attempt rather technical. I prefer something like an informal or even unconscious network of people who define and police a set of norms and boundaries for a society.

It is easier to see who constitutes the establishment. In the UK, it includes senior civil servants, royals and advisors, judges, blue chip business leaders, the BBC, Christian Church leaders, university academics and deans, and the military. For a time trade union leaders were reluctantly included. The list is similar in most counties but the balance is different. The series The Crown, among other wonders, beautifully depicted the British establishment of the post war era.

An establishment is self-serving. It is usually reactionary, and it wants to maintain its privileges and preserve unequal opportunities for its children. The opera still gets subsidies; public schools still enjoy charitable status; offshore tax clampdowns are limited.

But it can also be argued that many establishments are a net positive, when respectful of institutions and offering some openness. A society can more easily progress when the boundaries are known and stable. A good establishment is patient, thinks long-term, and is not too showy or arrogant. When disruptions come along, an establishment shows tolerance until an invisible line is crossed, at which point ranks are closed and power wielded.

Essentially there is a grand unwritten unconscious deal between the establishment and the public. We’ll let you stay in charge while we believe you have our back and you deliver benefits to us. Singapore, Dubai and China all work this way. 

Often, the very things that define the boundaries set by an establishment are the undiscussables. You can also characterise them as the too difficult column. An establishment can allow change, but not too much too fast and not without lots of stabilisers and consideration of unintended consequences. As a result, some issues are parked, but can explode should a catalyst arrive or should the establishment splinter.

Bagehot argues, with merit, that this splintering has happened in the UK. Some trends, usually good trends, make holding an establishment together harder, such as social media, globalisation, and better education. Bagehot does not agree with me, but I think the UK establishment committed an own goal under Thatcher in the 1980’s. One part got greedy and has remained greedy since, copying the US. Another part has lost respect for that part. The contract with the people has broken down. And when things like Brexit come along, the ranks don’t close like they used to.

Considering this helped me to understand what an establishment is, how it works, and how it can be good or bad. The Downton Abbey establishment of Victorian England was hopelessly inequitable, but enabled progress overall. The establishment in Pakistan, dominated by the military and fear of India, has held the nation back. The collapse of the establishment in Venezuela has led to awful suffering. The one in China, post Deng, has enabled the historic economic and social progress, but at the expense of building up undiscussables that will explode one day.

So thank you Bagehot and thanks again to Fintan O’Toole. It is good to be reminded that sometimes the perfect is the enemy of the good. The world has made fantastic progress over the last 75 years, even if the cost has been some undiscussables. Establishments have even carefully moved on some of those, such as acceptance of homosexuality, even in Ireland. Reactionaries have their place.