How to give:

At the age of 37, I was healthy, no short-term financial worries and now facing the context of how I would give of myself in a meaningful way. I’d taken enough of a reprieve from life. There were only so many coffee bars and newspapers a girl could read. It was the men in the 50 plus crowd of people I was meeting that captured my attention. They had been so focused on their careers, and when the career drew to a close they felt worthless.

So determined to ‘give my life for something’, I set out. I decided I would do something good for my community. A university degree and after 15 productive and successful years in corporate, I was sure there was something that I in particular would be able to do to add value to my community.

I went to the volunteer agency down the street, filled in the applications, with my many corporate talents and sport coaching endeavours, but most of all with my desire to give. After much thorough review, the agency decided that my talents would be best suited to supervise garbage pick-up on weekends. Needless to say, I was not inspired thinking that my talents would be reduced to such a ‘crucial’ community function. The feeling of aimlessness seeped into my psyche and I began to feel like many of these 50 something men who had been put out to pasture prematurely.