A month ago I started volunteering at a nearby hospital. There was no particular thought behind choosing a hospital -- I'm not in the medical field and I don't plan to be. I had been looking for a volunteer opportunity, but it was just happenstance that I noticed the "volunteer" link on the hospital's website while trying to get a physician referral.
Since I really didn't have any expectations of what I was getting myself into, I can't really say that it is or isn't what I expected. What I can say though is that it's become one of the highlights of my week. Why is working for free so great? There are a few reasons.
1) Four hours of peace. When I'm at home, if I'm not at the computer then my iPhone is in my hand. When I'm out, if my iPhone isn't in my hand, it's close at hand. There are books to be read, TV shows to be followed, Tweets to be cleverly responded to, movies to be watched, statuses to be updated, articles to be written, phone calls to be made, laundry to be done, meals to be cooked, dogs to be walked (well, one dog at least), und so weiter. When I get to the hospital, I turn off my iPhone, lock it in a locker, and spend four hours where the only computer that I have access to has no internet access. Bliss.
2) The home-office antidote. There are advantages to working at home and being your own boss. Being alone all day every day isn't one of them. In the course of four hours at the hospital I interact with other volunteers, patients, nurses, lab techs, and doctors (of course, the interaction with doctors is limited to them taking only cursory notice of me when we pass in the hallways). I'm hardly an extrovert, but this weekly booster shot of social interaction is much needed.
3) In a small way, not so free. Every week, each volunteer gets five dollars to spend at the hospital cafeteria. While that may sound chintzy, the prices are pretty reasonable to start with and we get the 20% employee discount. This means that I can get a full meal and a cup of coffee during a break in my shift. It's not the prix fix at Joel Robuchon, but a BBQ pork sandwich, apple, chocolate milk, and coffee that I don't have to make or pay for works plenty well for me.
4) Forgetting to be smart. When engaged in my day job, my brain is generally pushing into the red zone trying to dig for interesting topics to write about, find stocks to bring to investors' attention, discuss tried and true investment wisdom in new and interesting ways, and weave my way through heaps of economic data. When I'm at the hospital, nobody appears to think that I am capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time -- not only am I a volunteer, but I'm also about 30 years the junior of most of the other volunteers. I'm A-OK with being treated like that. Heck, sometimes I think I get a little too into the role -- today I got lost circling around a floor of the hospital and had to be pointed back to the elevator.
5) Helping. One of my main activities at the hospital is discharging patients. I bring a wheelchair to their room, help them in, wheel them out, and make sure they are safely on their way home. The returns on that are pretty straight-forward since the patients are typically very grateful and extremely happy to be going home. Less straight-forward is the work we do running samples to the lab, transporting equipment, and the like, however, when you think about it, with us doing that gofer work, the nurses are freed up to devote more time to patient care. And it's easy to feel pretty good about that too.
6) A sick person, an old person, and a dead person. It was coming across those three sights that set Siddhartha the prince on the path to becoming the Buddha. Or so the story goes. At my age, running 50+ miles per week, and doing pretty much whatever else I please, it's easy to forget that it doesn't last. There's no benefit in being morbid about it all, but as little as four hours per week in a hospital can offer a pretty heft dose of perspective. Invincible? Nah, just still very young and very lucky.
I guess it's cliche to say that you get back more than you give when you volunteer, but most cliches end up with that dubious title for a reason. I'm a big fan of getting paid for my work in monetary form, and hope to get paid even more for it in the future. But I'm also becoming a pretty big fan of supplementing my cash-producing work with some work that pays in other ways.
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