This week our evening meeting is at Leary’s Landing on Main Street in Bar Harbor! Thanks Shaun Farrar for securing the location! If there is somewhere you’d like to go in the upcoming months, please let me know.
This is the last president’s message of 2018! And what a year it’s been; we’ve begun several new service projects, received district citations for our good work, celebrated our 50th birthday and already donated about $7,000 to nonprofits in our community. We’ve been part of an important global grant to stop Malaria, and we’ve welcomed several wonderful new members.
I’m so grateful for all of you and the contributions you’ve made this year and in past years.
Rotary and clubs like ours show that there doesn’t need to be a polarity between having fun and being useful. So often in our lives, especially our work lives, we feel like we have to choose between those things. A lot of us feel like if it seems like we’re having too much fun, we aren’t being useful.
When I was a journalist, I heard that a lot. When I interviewed people, they couldn’t believe that I’d be able to write a good story because I was so happy when I interviewed them. I liked my job so much and had so much fun, I couldn’t possibly be good at it, right?
Wrong.
I think I had one correction in the entire time I was a journalist. That was for misspelling a name. The reporters and editors all thought something had to be wrong with me. Journalists are supposed to be miserable. Had I never watched a movie?
There is some weird mindset for many of us that work must be miserable and that goes for volunteer work, too. In order to do a good job, we must suffer and complain.
But Rotary proves that having fun and being useful aren’t mutually exclusive. Think about how much fun it was to actually build a playground, or to paint pinky fingers purple for polio. Think about how useful those activities were – or how great a time it is to hang out at the Bar Harbor Congregational Church on a Friday and fill backpacks with food or to chaperone the MDI High School’s Interact Club Prom with Downeast Horizons.
It’s so hard for many of us sometimes to remember that work can be both fun and useful. For many of us, reading a book is a good example of that. Can you think of work as both? Rotary as both? Or do you feel like you have to choose between the two? And what can we do these next six months to make Rotary more fun?
