Value Quote of the Week: Be useful

“Nothing in this world is so good as usefulness. It binds your fellow-creatures to you, and you to them; it tends to the improvement of your own character; and it gives you a real importance in society, much beyond what any artificial station can bestow.”

-Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie

     It’s not enough to just go through the motions of life like a passerby, it’s important for us to actually get involved in things that make us useful to ourselves and our society. It doesn’t make sense to just take up space on earth and not be part of what matters when even waste can be recycled for various uses.

    So, grab at chances to be useful and add value around you. It’s doesn’t have to be so far-fetched or elaborate, stuff like lending a listening ear, sharing, showing care, tolerance and kindness, giving your time, money and skills for worthy causes, going the extra mile in what you do, helping your parents out around the home, etc, are ways you can make yourself useful. However small it seems, seek to stay relevant and useful.

     Here’s a poem by Marge Piercy I stumbled on below. Hopefully, this challenges you to be useful and do something more than yourself. Cheers to the new week!

 

To Be of Use
by Marge Piercy

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

The work of the world is common as mud.
Botched, it smears the hands, crumbles to dust.
But the thing worth doing well done
has a shape that satisfies, clean and evident.
Greek amphoras for wine or oil,
Hopi vases that held corn, are put in museums
but you know they were made to be used.
The pitcher cries for water to carry
and a person for work that is real.

-TheValueAdder™