Archana Dilip shares how volunteering helped her to understand that it’s OK to pace herself.
I volunteered to chaperone my daughter’s second-grade class on a trip to the library one morning. Naively, I thought it would be a simple act of helping out, but I didn’t realize I was about to learn something profound. As a mother of two, my days move at lightning speed.
From the moment I wake up, I’m on a mission: getting the kids to brush their teeth, getting them dressed, doing their hair, feeding them breakfast, packing lunches, squeezing in a quick workout, dropping them at school and then diving straight into work meetings.
My brain hardly gets a moment to catch up before it’s racing again. My life feels designed around efficiency. So, when the librarian handed me a basket of returned books and asked if I could help put them back on the shelves, I went into my usual “go mode.” I zipped around the library, quickly sorting and shelving, until she looked at me and smiled gently. “You work fast,” she said.
Without thinking, I replied, “Yes, I’m trying hard.” She paused for a moment, then said softly but powerfully, “You don’t have to.” Her words stopped me in my tracks. Something about that sentence felt freeing; as if someone had given me permission to slow down. To breathe. To not measure my worth by how much I got done or how quickly I did it.