One Thought

A week and a half ago, I issued a new challenge to myself.

I blocked out a week of my life. The plan: to help other people out, full-time — eight to ten hours per day, for seven days straight. Everything I’d do beyond sleeping, showering, eating, and a bit of relaxing would be devoted to others.

This week would be about them, not me.

I’ve become interested recently in immersive challenges as a means to personal growth. A month ago, I spent 16 hours in the kitchen over a single weekend after a decade of avoiding cooking. The experience was fun, enlightening, and exhausting.

I thought afterward: I need to do this more often. Despite its arbitrariness, the challenge was exhilarating. It brought me fully into the present moment. It shook up my reality: Here I was thinking about and preparing food to the point of exhaustion after a decade of procrastinating. It was almost an out-of-body experience. (No kidding!)

There’s something about an immersive challenge that brings me to life. The focus, the determination, the immediacy. The doing of things completely foreign to me. The fear of failing. These challenges are so much more fun than taking baby steps, making routines, analyzing, planning. Why do things the boring way?

I’ve wanted to become more other-focused for some time now.

It’s a long story. I’d like to say it’s not about my having been selfish, per se, but about my being an individualist. I’m sure my feeling of being an outsider, which came from my childhood, has something to do with it.

The point of this experiment is to shed what’s-in-it-for-me thinking for a week. It’s to immerse myself in others’ perspectives. It’s to understand what they want and to give it to them — without asking for anything in return.

I craft a plan: I block out a week where I would make no other commitments. I’ll spend the majority of each of these seven days helping other people.

How will I help them? I could spend the week doing unsolicited favors for people — cleaning my entire 5-bedroom apartment (which I share with roommates), volunteering at the homeless shelter, cleaning garbage in the park, etc. Or I could ask people how I could help them and simply do what they request — run their errands, do their laundry, whatever they want.

After waffling between extremes, I decide to do both. Why limit myself to one form of help? The two types take different mindsets, and I want to experience both.

I generate a long list of ideas. Once I’m sure I have enough — it’s not easy to fill an entire week! — I get started.

This is how things go.

Day 1 – Cleaning house

Deciding to start close to home on day 1, I spend about seven hours cleaning the common rooms of my five-bedroom apartment. The apartment doesn’t get cleaned very often, and when it does it takes my roommates and me several hours working together.

After seven hours of scrubbing toilets and mopping floors, I still have more to do, but I’m tired — and to be honest, I’m starting to feel a bit irritable. Helping out is easier said than done. After finishing, I shop for food and cook fried rice for the roommates and myself.

Day 2 – Trash pickup

I start day 2 a little farther from home, heading over to Dolores Park, a well-known hangout in San Francisco’s Mission District.

I’m not here to hang out, though. The weather’s gloomy, it’s 10 AM, and I have a few large trash bags.

The park itself is already pretty clean, but the public rail tracks beside it are covered in garbage. I’ve found the mother lode: There’s plenty of trash to pick up — as long as I can avoid getting hit by the train. Dying wouldn’t be very helpful.

I spend two hours filling two and a half large trash bags with liquor bottles, candy wrappers, burrito remnants, and what look like nitrous oxide canisters. At one point, some hippie-looking dudes look down at the tracks and yell, “Right on, man!” — marking the high point of what may have been the low point of my week.

It starts raining, so I can’t pick up any more trash. I head home and post a Facebook message to all my friends, asking them how I can help them. I get a big response. Everyone has things they want me to do. That’s good, because I have plenty of time over the next six days.

I do my friend Christine’s laundry. While at the laundromat, I begin affixing 500 stickers to 500 cards for my friend Arvel’s fledgling record label. I finish a couple hours later. I sign up for work in a soup kitchen the next day at a friend’s suggestion. I research techniques for getting a good night’s sleep for my stressed-out brother Chris (at his request) and send him a report. I end the day by cooking a large stir fry for the roommates.

Day 3 – Meatballs for the homeless

Day 3 begins with community service work at Glide, a soup kitchen in San Francisco’s slummy Tenderloin district. I’m here to serve lunch to the homeless and otherwise down-and-out.

While there are a few other volunteers, it’s clear that a number of the helpers are doing their mandatory community service work. I make eye contact with one tough-looking guy and say, “What’s up?” His response: “I’m having a bad day.”

The permanent kitchen workers are all, by contrast, very friendly. They assign me to be the “runner,” meaning my job is to ferry trays, cups, and silverware from the cleaning room in the back of the cafeteria to the service area in front. The cafeteria itself is in the basement of the building and has the look of a slightly spruced-up prison mess hall.

Soon a large line forms and people are streaming in. On the menu are cabbage, some kind of rice, and meatballs and gravy on a hotdog bun. The room gets crowded very quickly. I carry utensils back and forth and refill pitchers from a garbage can full of water.

People are scraping food off others’ trays before it gets thrown out. One guy waits by the garbage for 20 minutes, filling a plastic bag with scraps for his dog.

At one point, a fight breaks out. Two men are rolling on the ground under a table, and some others are shouting and rubber-necking to see what’s going on. Security comes over to break it up. I walk around the crowd with another rack of cups.

The experience overall is interesting and quite rewarding. I head home and finish cleaning the house, which takes a couple hours. I spend the rest of the day researching loose leaf tea prices for my friend Ameeth and editing my friend Rachel’s grad school application essay.

Day 4 – Habitat restoration

Day 4 — a Saturday — starts early. At 9 AM, I arrive at Mount Sutro in San Francisco, ready to do some habitat restoration with an organized group. I found this gig on OneBrick.org, a great site that pairs volunteers with projects for one-off events.

This event is popular: over 40 people show up. I join a group heading to the top of the mountain to do some weeding. Apparently the entire mountain was overgrown and inaccessible prior to the founding of this project a few years back.

I spend about three hours pulling sow thistle, forget-me-not, french broom, and some kind of ivy from the ground. These are all invasive species; they’re crowding out the less-hearty native plants. The work is fun, and it’s nice to get my hands dirty. The people are cool, too.

Later in the day I spend a couple hours collecting band review data for my friend Arvel’s record label, at his request. I start reading excerpts of my friend Kim’s novel, which she is submitting to agents and planning to use in her grad school applications.

Day 5 – Reading about pyrates

For day 5, I choose an ambitious project: I will record a chapter of a book for LibriVox, on online library of public domain audiobooks recorded by volunteers. I found out about LibriVox a month ago, and I’ve been listening to books from it in the gym.

After some deliberation, I choose A General History of the Pyrates, a 1724 book containing biographies of contemporary pirates — you know, Blackbeard, Calico Jack, Black Bart, etc. I wouldn’t want to deprive the world of eighteenth century pirate audiobooks, now would I?

To make a long story short, it takes about 8 hours before I have an (almost-)finished product. It takes a while to create an acceptable recording setup, and it’s hard not to stumble over sentences like this one:

We find him Commander of a Pyrate Sloop of eight Guns, and 80 Men, in the Month of September, 1716, cruising off Jamaica, Cuba, etcetera, about which Time he took the Berkley Galley, Captain Saunders, and plundered him of 1000 pounds in Money, and afterwards met with a Sloop call’d the King Solomon, from whom he took some Money, and Provisions, besides Goods, to a good Value.

Yarr. When I’m done, I continue reading Kim’s novel — she’s sent about 70 pages! It’s good.

Day 6 – Sweeping the sidewalk

I return to the outdoors on the morning of day 6, sweeping leaves off the sidewalk on my block. This is the urban equivalent of raking the front lawn.

I feel a bit dumb doing this. But hey, it’s helpful, right? I’ve seen other people sweeping the street in my neighborhood, so they at least must appreciate the work. And the sidewalk is damn clean when I’m done an hour and a half later.

I finish Kim’s novel excerpts and send her feedback. I research technical details for my friend Brett’s consulting project, which aims to create online gallery software for existing art collections.

At this point I’ve done everything my friends requested, and I need to make a little work for myself. The most exhausting part about this project isn’t the helping itself; it’s the constant search for things to do. It’s not easy fill a whole week with helpful activities.

I sign up for Aardvark, a social search / question answering site that started recently. Unfortunately, I spend a lot of time looking for questions to answer and only find one that I’m actually qualified to answer. That’s not very helpful!

Oh well — the day’s almost over. I end it by cooking a large batch of mint brownies for everyone.

Day 7 – Stuffing envelopes

The week is almost up! I’ve enjoyed it, but I’m getting really tired. It’s been about 10 days since I had a day off.

I spend a couple hours editing and finishing up my Pyrates recording. My friend Raja says he doesn’t have anything specific for me to do, but he’d like me to read Gandhi’s autobiography, which he says will help maximize my positive impact on the world. Sounds good! I start reading.

Before heading off to my last volunteer event, I head downtown and walk around for a little while, giving a dollar to every panhandler I see. This is an interesting experience — I’m actively seeking out panhandlers after avoiding them for years.

In the evening, I head over to the offices of Streetside Stories, a non-profit that helps children improve their literacy skills. I’m here to stuff donation-request envelopes. Though this sounds mundane, it actually ends up being pretty fun and social.

After writing “Hi [name], We hope you can join us!” on envelope inserts for a couple hours, I chat with the other volunteers and then head home.

The week is over!

I’m tired, but satisfied. I’ve spent more than 60 hours helping others, done a bunch of interesting stuff, and met some cool people.

My intent during this week was to give the world what it wanted; it wasn’t to impose my will on it. I tried not to question the motives or intentions of others. I wasn’t choosey about how I helped; no task was below me.

I can already feel my perspective shifting. That was the main goal of this project. It wasn’t so much about the specific acts of helping as it was about taking the perspective of others. It was about immersing myself in their perspectives.

This week-long experiment will, I’m sure, filter into the rest of my life. And that’s what I love most about immersion — though temporary, its effects are often permanent.

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Image credits:

Help Wanted by kandyjaxx
Dolores Park Tracks by atp_tyreseus
Mount Sutro Vegetation by Whole Wheat Toast
Glide Line by Andrew Turner
Leaves on the Sidewalk by me.