21. The power of service
When was the last time you did something to help someone else? Did you spend a Saturday helping a friend move? Take some neighborhood kids on a field trip? Visit someone in the hospital? Carve time out of a busy schedule to listen to a colleague who needed a sympathetic ear?
Maybe you did something more ambitious, like serving meals at a soup kitchen, volunteering at an animal shelter, or working with Habitat for Humanity to build a house. In 2020, Kristina Wong, an artist colleague of mine, took on the project of sewing masks for health care workers during the Coronavirus pandemic and ended up spawning a national network of volunteer seamstresses, the Auntie Sewing Squad, that distributed thousands of handmade masks to communities across the United States that did not have access to them.
When you help someone else, how does it make you feel?
I was born under the astrological sign of Virgo. When I was younger, I wasn’t happy about this. Not only was Virgo synonymous with virgin, which, when I was a young adult, you definitely did not want to be, but other linked traits similarly lacked pizzazz — yes, we were said to be intelligent, but also practical, analytical, reliable, perfectionistic, overcritical. Perhaps worst, Virgos were associated with service.
