Volunteer at your library — get fit

A mysterious spa-effect. 

What? How? 

Come, walk in the shoes of a volunteer and find out.

Say you volunteer to show up at the Automated Materials Handler room. The supervisor greets you and points at racks filled with ready-to-shelve material. Books and digital content are in a variety of categories, for children, adults and YA. There’s fiction, nonfiction, sci-fi, romance, graphic novels. There are old and new movie DVDs and Blu-ray discs, music CDs. The supervisor asks you to pick a category to shelve. You decide to organize books in “Adult Fiction.” To carry books to the library, you load a three-level page truck (cart). Then, before you move the cart, you sort the books on it, to ease your work at the library.

The fiction collection is in the order of the last name of the author. So, you start the sort with letter “A,” and go from there. Simple, right? In a quick shuffle, you arrange books on the top level from A to R.

Next, you kneel down for the second shelf. Oh, there are several books under “C,” “K,” even “A.” The top level is full though. To make space, you move books from one level to the next. You also take a peek at the bottom shelf — the books are all across the alphabet. You rethink and decide to work across levels. 

You look, kneel, bend, sit and stand, again and again. After 20 minutes, it’s done.

You smile. Yet you know it’s only the warm up. The real workout is at the library. You roll the cart in and out of the elevator, and reach the library door. It’s outside public hours. So you knock. A moment later, a staff member opens the door. As you enter, to move through the scanner panels, you orient the cart sideways, engage your core and push. Once in, you hold your position and proceed toward the fiction section.

At the letter “A” shelves, you kick off your workflow.

• Focus: From the sorted books on the cart, you focus on the first book with a

letter “A” label.

• Find: For your book, you look for its alphabetical place on the shelves. There it is, easy! Now you only need to place your book. 

There’s no space though. You look around to move an item to another shelf — the rows above and below are also without any room. You sit, stand, bend, reach up and move through the whole rack. At long last, you spot a shelf with some space. You move a book to this shelf from the one before it, to maintain the sequence. You repeat this across several shelves, until there’s room on the shelf of your book. Whew!

This situation is common with books of prolific writers, like James Patterson. This author writes a series of books on different themes. The library also has many copies of the same book. So, to keep related books together, along with the location and theme, you also check for a book’s copies. Sometimes, even after all the back and forth, your book turns out to be too big for the space. Here, to make enough room, you rescan the shelves and move books around, again and again.

Sit ups, lunges, stretches — these exercises are a part of several searches. However, with practice, it feels effortless, almost meditative. And once you make space, you take a deep breath.

• Fit: You exhale and place your item.

Even when you have to find on-hold/requested items, you follow the same three-step approach:

• Focus on the listed item.

• Lunge up and down, stretch right to left and flex yourself to find the item.

• Fit the item in your cart.

Before you check out, you report your volunteer hours on the computer. Next to the screen is a bowl filled with treats. You grab a candy, and toss it in your mouth — blissful! A public library is a gift to any city. The librarians, patrons, staff are a part of your community — an extension of your home.

The upkeep of your home tones your body, sharpens your mind and grows your heart.

Likewise, your service to your local library can come back to you as a gift of well-being.

So, reach out to your local library and sign up to be a volunteer today.

Qwee (Kavita Srinivasan, South San Francisco) writes stories, makes art and plays music.