Respecting Elders, Finding a Niche

On some Wednesdays, I make my way to Agora at 1:15pm and take a short drive to the Genesis Healthcare Center. The center is a place where residents, mostly senior citizens, receive care, and it is the location of the ESSO club Games with Seniors. Sometimes I dread the idea of losing an hour and a half on Wednesday afternoons, but I have never regretted going.Exeter is an environment that makes it impossibly easy to become an individual, and in some ways, to become separated from other individuals. It’s about my classes and my assignments and my workload and my problems. And even though we interact with other people every day, there are very few moments when what’s going on in another person’s life is more important to us than what is going on in our own.Games with Seniors gives me those moments. When Ken quizzes me about what his favorite things are-chocolate cake and chocolate ice cream and me-or how old he is or what he did in World War II, I am there to remind him that I care about the things in his life. When Carol tells me about her new stuffed animals or the bracelet that she is wearing, I am there to share the little things in her life. When Mary calls me her girl, I am there because, at least for an hour, that is the only thing I need and want to be.Sometimes when we’re at the center, though, it’s hard. Sometimes it’s hard to understand what the residents are saying. Sometimes it’s awkward. Sometimes we run out of things to talk about. Sometimes it’s hard to smile and listen and pay attention to someone else when we have so much work waiting for us when we get back on campus. Still, I have never regretted making the trip, and the residents there have never failed to make my day better.What Games with Seniors forces me to do is make a connection with another human being, to focus all of my attention on him or her. I don’t do that nearly often enough. To stop thinking about myself, to leave my personal bubble, to experience another person’s humanity for an hour and a half every week has been immeasurably good for my soul.I realize that there is a sense of impropriety in claiming that one of the most important aspects of the community service that I do is the benefit to myself. I’ve warred with the idea for a while, and what I’ve found is that it’s impossible to separate the two. I do community service because I care about the senior citizens I spend time with, and I do community service because the senior citizens remind me how to be human.The senior citizens remind me that people and shared moments are infinitely more valuable and more important than any test score. They remind me that connecting, sharing, and listening to people are worth the effort. I always leave with the sense that an hour or so has helped me toward achieving the important goals in life, the ones that have nothing to do with our material success and everything to do with fulfilling the needs of our subconscious.Taking those moments to focus on someone else feeds my psyche. It’s good for my sanity, and it’s good for my sense of reality. Between class and clubs and standardized testing it is difficult to remember to do things that are good for us on a level that feeds our spirit, but it is so important for people, Exonians especially, to remember to do that. If we don’t take the time to focus completely on things outside of ourselves every once in awhile, our lives become a series of material and superficial interactions, and we start to be alive without living.