I have a personal request for you. And it’s extremely important.
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The timing, indeed, is spot on since we’re waking up Sunday morning, springing forward an hour.
But why stop at the seasonal time change? Why not spring into something else like… volunteering?
It’s something I start banging on the proverbial drum as hard as I do at this time of the year, leading up to mid-April: the home of National Volunteer Week.
Because volunteers changed my life.
They can change yours, too.
If you’re a regular reader of this journalistic endeavour — God bless you, and I greatly appreciate it — you may be familiar with the yarn I’m about to spin.
If you are new to my story, you may skim through the following words.
The one thing, though, I would like you to take with you is this.
I hold very little responsibility for what I have done and continue to do.
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It’s the people around me who have encouraged me — when, on the contrary, countless others clearly communicated to me I would never amount to much.
Honestly.
I experienced the gift of volunteering at age five, and it lasted five years.
A total of 116 volunteers came to our house in Lynwood every week, eight times a day, for five minutes.
Lying face down, with one volunteer turning my head, one my left side moving my arm and leg, another doing the same all in sync, and another one controlling my feet, to put me through the motions of a baby crawling.
Patterns, they are called, and our volunteers did over 14,000 patterns from 1965 to 1969.
They came to help me because I did not breathe for the first 17 minutes. I took a breath for a minute before I quit breathing.
I did not start breathing on my own until I was 45 minutes old.
The lack of oxygen at birth developed cerebral palsy, and, as a baby, I did not crawl. When a baby crawls, along with developing muscles, it ignites the brain to orchestrate mobility functions.
My volunteers took me from a young boy who could not open his hands, sit up, open hands, extend my arms, bend my legs to a nine-year-old who could sit up, open my hands, stand up, and even take 36 steps by myself.
I think the best way to honour the volunteers is to ask you to follow in their footsteps.
I am, however, concerned a child out there needs volunteers right now. And not getting them.
That’s one child too many.
Five minutes a day. That’s all I ask to share with a young person a day.
After all, you’ve got a head start – a whole hour.
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