Giving back to the community

In Ontario, you need forty hours of volunteering to earn your high school diploma. I resisted that requirement at first. But as I grew older, I began to understand the importance of giving back to the communities that have made room for you. What remains of me when I’m gone? The assignments I finished will mean little, and I won’t be here to hold on to my own memories. What might last is the effect I had on other people: how I made them feel, what I helped them through, whether their lives were a little better because I was there.

One of those experiences was volunteering with University Settlement at the Grange Festival in Toronto. I helped with activities and spent time talking to the children who came by. I was at an age when I had started to think of myself as an adult, but their questions and ways of seeing things made that distinction feel less settled. I recognized something of myself in their curiosity, in how much there still was to wonder about.

I think people are a little like onions. The outer layers can seem complicated, rough, even uninviting. But if you keep peeling, with enough patience and care, you begin to find the child still living underneath.