Why volunteer?

I’ve always thought of volunteering as something noble and way out of my list of things I want to do.. until now.
The basic reason for this is that I like to make money, lots of it.
Why do I like to make money..the obvious thing is to survive and to be able to meet all the commitments for the life I want to live.
These commitments include eating out, travel, gardening, running a car, treating my friends..the list goes on.
Therefore, I have always thought of volunteering as dull, committed, soul destroying, depressing, picking up after others... the list goes on.
So taking each of these points in turn, I will explain my pre-conceived ideas of what volunteering means:
Dull is where you go to an institution on the same day each week and do the boring jobs the employed, paid people don’t want to do.
Committed =tied to the same hours each week which creates problems for people like me who want to be free as air.
Soul-destroying is seeing the same things needing doing with no progress.
Depressing is really where there is nothing in it for you, where you can’t see any point.
Picking up after others can be exhausting, again with no reward.
So, why volunteer. There will be many people who take great joy in all of the above and will gladly take on menial jobs, seeing it as a means of’giving something back’. It is especially appropriate if you have received loving and caring treatment from the source where you now volunteer.
However, (and you will be relieved to hear that this is the point of this article), I am not one of them, but I find myself VOLUNTEERING. I’m not altruistic or even particularly kind.
This is not just any volunteering. I am involved in two separate and completely different projects.
Both projects reward me in very different ways and I plan to use this blog to chart my progress through both projects, sharing the fun and joy and the more hairy times. I will show how I do things and hopefully encourage others to ..yes, volunteer.