Listening to the heart

Posted on | March 26, 2009 |

I’ve recently begun asking colleagues for old and used books I can pass on to the Department of Youth Services.  Young offenders who read - and it doesn’t seem to matter much what they read - tend not to re-offend upon release.  It’s as though reading introduces them to another world so that they don’t feel they have to be trapped in their own circumstances to the same extent.  Reading awakens the idea of options and possibilities, and to some extent this is exactly what they, and all of us, need.  Now, it isn’t a magic bullet or anything.  Yet it does make a difference to some very vulnerable people.

The DYS, unfortunately, has no budget for books.?Initially I hesitated to ask for books for a variety of reasons.  One was that a colleague, whom I find hard to understand, had already set up a book recycling plan in which books are sold and the money used for various projects. I didn’t want to offend anyone.  So I hesitated.

Of course this was absurd.  In the struggle between helping young people at risk, and risking offense to a colleague there was really no contest.  Yet I did hesitate. It just goes to show how ‘politeness’ can get in the way of actually doing something useful.

So I asked for books.  And the results have been most pleasing.  It turns out (as I should have expected) that there are more than enough old books for both my cause and my colleague’s.  I even had emails from people who already send their books to a preferred charity, and who apologized for not being able to contribute to the DYS.  I think I found these emails to be some of the most encouraging of them all.

So the books mount up, and when the pile gets a little bigger I’ll take fill up the aging Buick til the springs sag, and head off to the new destination.

If I’d listened to my head I’d have heard: ‘don’t risk offending your colleague’, and I’d not have set this in motion.  Instead I listened to my heart, and it had no doubts at all.
Looking at it now it seems so obvious….

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