Harry's Pieces

 
 Welcome to Harry's Pieces. Below are some inspiring and informational pieces written by Henry Lodge, M.D.
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Open call for limbic resources !

Chris and I would like to begin collecting what we call limbic resources. These are organizations, mostly non-profits, that offer effective vehicles for Younger Next Year members to get connected, do some good, and build their limbic base.

I will share a short story to get the ball rolling.

I was sitting with a very nice guy this weekend at a lunch, while picking up our respective daughters from camp. He told me that back in the late 80s he had found an organization called Earthwatch which matched up people wanting to go do volunteer field work with scientists who needed the labor.

The deal was that you paid all of your own expenses, and I believe then some, in exchange for which you got to go do hard dirty thankless work with a bunch of other volunteers, for one, two or three weeks, though I suspect you could go for longer. In his case they went to a remote tropical location to work for a woman who was getting her PhD studying something about lizards. There were apparently nine or ten volunteers, and they spent three weeks digging trenches, lying out in the blazing hot sun, tracking the habits of the lizards, figuring out what they ate, doing plant surveys, etc, etc.

They had to bury their food two feet below ground to keep it from roasting during the day. There were tents, and holes rather than outhouses, warm brackish water that had been brought in weeks before, and very primitive food – and he loved every minute of it.

It wasn’t, as he said, a life-changing experience, because he was old enough to have had his share of those along the way, but it certainly was a life-enriching experience, and one that has stayed with him in important ways ever since.

This is probably a more intense example than most people would be seeking, though I will say that it is my understanding that the majority of new Peace Corps volunteers these days are retirees who commit for a year or two, and bring enormous value and get enormous rewards from the experience.

We would like to hear from anybody out there who has done anything from a local community-based organization where you give smaller amounts of time steadily over the years, to things involving travel and commitments of significant chunks of time, to begin building a resource base for us all to share, and hopefully to begin learning common lessons about how to jump into community, organize this on a more formal basis, and in general begin to approach limbic wealth as something to be consciously sought out, built up and shared.
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