Volunteering vs. Dating

I'm again back on the thought of volunteering. I want to give back to the community somehow and find myself more productive. I want to encourage my son to interact more and also volunteer. A while back, I did brief research on different options and didn't really come up with much that I was interested or intrigued. In my mind today, I thought that if we committed to one evening a week to volunteer, either at a Mission or Shelter or something, that maybe we would have some type of impact. Either personally or with someone else.

I feel like volunteering is a lot like dating. You have to be willing to commit yourself to something or someone or possibly even someones. You have to be willing to give up self sacrifice either for someone else or for your own personal gains. Or...maybe you don't have to do either, just be willing to share or give of your time and whatever happens, happens. But regardless, it's a committment. Neither necessarily have to be a specific committment of your time, but both would probably fare better if they were, at least for scheduling and consistency purposes.

My son's basketball season is wrapping up. He has one week left and then, I think, we are sport free until the conditioning pre-baseball season which will likely begin sometime in February or March at the very latest. So the reality is, we could commit to possibly two-three months of a nightly volunteer opportunity without the possibility of conflict of another sport. Any time is better than none, isn't it? Or is it?

If you can't commit to something, if you can't give of your time or yourself completely or to a level of acceptance, do you offer your time at all? Do you start something that you have no intention of ever finishing (and this isn't referencing eating by any means!)?

Maybe it's time to just revel in the fact that we don't have to DO. That we can take a couple of months off and enjoy ourselves, each other and anything we want to do, without making a committment to do.

And maybe during that time we can learn, grow and become better for having done so.