In the last letter I got from D, sent Saturday, she told me she had recently gotten a letter from her daughter. Her daughter graduated from college some years ago and has been working; but she [the daughter, call her "D Jr" for the moment] recently quit her job so that she and her boyfriend (who is supposed to be studying for the bar exam) could travel through Europe and the Near East for some extended period of time. [Note added in early 2012: I talk about this daughter often enough that I have to do better than "D Jr," so in the future I'll call her "Brittany".]
Apparently part of what D Jr wrote about was a criticism of how D has been handling her professional life -- not some kind of post-adolescent whine, but an independent evaluation by someone not wrapped up in the hear-and-now of it all. D told me she appreciated this criticism; I think she sees it as a contributing factor to the question, What is her story now? What is she to be doing? In any event, she wrote me as follows:
[My daughter's] letter was long and very newsy; she loves her travels and is learning and growing before my eyes. However, she has little patience with me and I appreciate her direct comments, although they also sting. I'll copy the first paragraph to give you a sense of her critique of my choice to remain at [the school where D teaches today]. I'll be interested in your response.
I got your letter and was quite saddened by it.... I feel very
distressed at this time to be so far away from you -- its hard to say as much as
I want in a letter. Here I am in Europe; I go from house to house, city to city,
looking at how people live, what brings meaning to their lives -- or
alternatively, what seems completely empty and meaningless about their lives --
and I try very hard to think and piece together what kind of a life (and how) I
would like to live when I return. And I wish you could do something similar,
because I am sure that would not structure your life the way it is now, if you
had space to reflect more on it. If you were one of the people I visited along
this road, I would be shocked to see such an intelligent woman enslaved to this
job that doesn't treat you right, that serves a mission you've lost faith in,
and that saps all your time so you can't do anything else. I hope that maybe you
can write me next about what keeps you from quitting tomorrow. I know that there
are financial pressures, but surely they can be dealt with, especially now that
[my younger brother] is almost graduating [from college, and therefore won't be
your financial responsibility any longer]. I think a really important thing I am
learning about on this trip is how to deal with discontinuities in life. Every
time I move, which is almost every other day right now, my surroundings change,
my schedule, everything is changed, and it can be difficult to adapt. Sometimes
we get stranded out in the middle of nowhere with no clue how we are going to
get to the next place but something always happens and brings us back around. I
think of all the people at my office who couldn't even imagine quitting their
job, their safety, let alone go and do what I'm doing, and I remember that it's
difficult for everyone, but the rewards are very great. The problem,
psychologically, is not being able to imagine what might come next, that life
continues, you keep living and acting, but you are not able to picture how or to
what end. Like, we will somehow get to [a certain town] tomorrow. I have no idea
how. I don't know what road we will take, or who will take us there, but it will
happen, I have learned that much by now.
My reply to D grew as I wrote it, and ended up wandering in directions I had never anticipated before I put my fingers on the keyboard. (Have you ever had that happen? It can be disoncerting.)
D Jr's comments are fascinating, and I find my thoughts heading off in a lot of different directions as I read them. My comments may be correspondingly scattered. I guess the first thing I observe, because it really is overpowering to me, is how much she writes like you. No surprise, of course. But phrases like, "I try very hard to think and piece together what kind of a life (and how) I would like to live when I return," sound like they could have come directly from your pen. It makes me wonder who I sound like. (smile)
A second thing I notice is that her critique is almost identical to your own. This may be why it made you squirm so much ... that you yourself have written exactly the same thing, expressed in only slightly different words, in any number of letters to me.
One difference between her critique and your own, though -- and this is a third thing that I noticed right away -- is that hers is obviously written by somebody young. She writes with a simplicity which is honestly more difficult for people our age, at least if they are self-reflective. I recognize it because I used to write that way too. But I also know that it takes a lot more courage now for me to simplify any issue quite so far.
Note that while simplicity is in some respects a virtue -- and particularly an intellectual virtue -- I do not say that her critique is thereby more accurate than it would be if it were more complicated. There are elements of the picture that I think she misses. Most basically, she identifies (implicitly) four reasons why you might work at [your school]: that the work might engage your creative intellect, that the people might treat you well, that you might believe in the mission of the place, or that you might need the money. She then dismisses the first three out of hand (unsurprisingly, as I assume you have told her stories of the place similar to the ones you have told me), and suggests that you have allowed the fourth to frighten you more than it should. But I can think of a couple of other reasons why you might not "quit tomorrow." One is that you did, after all, agree to teach this year, and I agree that at some level it is important to honor our commitments even when we have made those commitments to jerks. What's more, quitting a teaching job mid-year is not exactly like quitting a job at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble. It is a major problem for any school to replace any teacher mid-year; for [your school] to replace you teaching the classes you are currently teaching would be a catastrophic impossibility. It would be easier to replace a principal than that. And I am certain that your awareness of this fact is part of what will keep you there through June 2011. In addition, I know that you feel a certain commitment to (and even fondness for) a number of your students .... It is only natural that you would feel reluctant to turn your back on them. Nor is it true that you get nothing out of the job; it may not engage your creative or critical intellect, but I do think that it challenges your spirit in ways that demand a creative emotional response on a daily basis. How do you respond to the student scratching his pubic hair? What will you say to your classes to keep them on track when nine of their classmates are in jail? These are problems that you have to solve on the fly, and none of them is easy. Say what you will about this job, but it's never dull. And whatever you may say about it intellectually, at the level of spiritual warfare it is never stultifying.
Lastly, and perhaps most prosaically, it's not as easy as it sounds to find a job. I've been there, and I can vouch for this. You would not be the first person to stay at a job that makes you crazy because the prospect of finding another is so daunting.
I think this last point introduces another respect in which D Jr's letter sounds like the thought of someone young. You remember that Miss Giardino says it is important for the young to be cautious and conservative, because they have their whole lives to live with the consequences of their actions; but the old can afford to be impetuous, because how much difference can it make anyway? What is so striking about this opinion is that it is simultaneously so logical and so contrary to all our experience. What we see when we look around us is older people who become terrified of change because they have had time to see -- far more than the young -- just how badly wrong things can go. The young who have grown up under trying circumstances can know this too, of course; but for those who have grown up safely it can be easy to underestimate the potential for things to end up badly. Age brings a greater awareness of this pessimistic side of things, but I think at the same time it can make us too timid. To misquote Hamlet, "Thus knowledge doth make cowards of us all."
D Jr's letter shows an abundant faith in things working themselves out; I might almost say that it shows an abiding faith in special Providence: "we will somehow get to [a certain town] tomorrow, I have no idea how. I dont know what road we will take, or who will take us there, but it will happen, I have learned that much by now." This is what I used to say about finding a job, during the year and a half that I was unemployed. I didn't know where I would find work, or doing what, but I knew for a fact that there was a road marked out for me and sooner or later I would stumble upon it. And, sure enough, I did. It is easy -- and probably not altogether wrong -- to attribute this faith in part to youth, as I suggest above. I think it is also, paradoxically, a faith that it is easier to have when you are insecure. D Jr says as much when she says, "I think a really important thing I am learning about on this trip is how to deal with discontinuities in life." And I know for myself that it is a lot harder for me to have this faith now -- when my life is comparatively stable (because I have a job and I have reached a tenuous modus vivendi with Wife) -- than it was back in 2004 (when more or less everything was in question). It is strange. But I can vouch that the times in my life when I have felt most palpably the faith that things would turn out OK have been the times when everything was the most uncertain.
This insight, about faith in things to come as a concomitant of radical uncertainty, is something I hadn't thought of when I sat down to write this letter. I didn't realize I was going to say it. But as I started to write, I realized that my earlier theme -- harping on how easy it is for young whippersnappers to lecture us old geezers like this -- was false in an important way. Not entirely false, of course. There is a level at which is preserves some truth. But there is this other level too. From where I sit today -- where I have a job and a mortgage and my life is largely predictable -- I am particularly sensitive to the risks in what D Jr says. What if you quit and then can't find something else? What if you throw yourself on the beneficence of Chance, and then there is nobody to catch you? For that matter, what happens if D Jr herself decides finally that she wants This or That Kind of Life ... only she can't get it because her travels have caused her to miss the window? What happens if she decides she wants such-and-such a career, but the hiring authorities who guard the gates decide that someone who quits her job to go travelling like this is too unreliable to take on? The thing is, I even know the answers to all these fears. To take only the last one, the answer is obviously that any employer who is so rigid and unimaginative that he lets D Jr's travels constitute an insuperable barrier to hiring her is somebody she never wants to work for anyway. There will always be somebody else, somewhere, who can see the value she brings and will snap her up. And even if there is only one such employer in a hundred with a spark of imagination, it only takes one. Or she may choose not to work for somebody else at all, but to make her own way in a manner that she could never have done without the wider perspective of her travelling right now. See, I know all this intellectually. I'm even persuaded that it is all true. But from where I sit today, I can't feel it. From where I sit today, all I can feel is concern at the uncertainty into which she has launched herself, fear at her walking across that wire without a net, and anxiety at her trying to persuade you to do the same thing. If I were myself unemployed and cut adrift, I would probably feel a lot more sanguine about the whole thing, because I would be able to feel the hand of Providence far more palpably than I can right now.
What am I recommending? I don't know. On the one hand, I think of your repeated desire to live as if you really believed in God, not as a practical atheist, and I think (as I have said) that D Jr's advice shows a measure of faith in God's Providence which is denied by clinging to the Known for dear life. On the other hand, I don't think God exactly advises recklessness either. Even Jesus wouldn't throw himself off the highest spire of the Temple; is it not tempting God for us to throw ourselves blindly into the Unknown? Nelson Bolles, in his job-hunting guide, explains that you should always have a Plan B; as a counter-example he cites a family who stopped paying their rent because they thought the end of the world was at hand, and who were convinced that God would arrange a miracle to keep them from being evicted. They were evicted. So I don't know what this adds up to. Certainly I would never recommend that you quit mid-year, for all the reasons that I outlined several paragraphs above. But after June? I'm not so sure. Maybe you can get a clearer picture through prayer than I can possibly give you, because I realize I'm generating a lot more dust than light. It is also only fair to recognize that your job is merely one facet of your life, and maybe not the one that interests Providence the most right now. Certainly nobody could accuse you of "clinging to the Known" in your personal life these last two years. (small smile) Maybe that's where the focus is right now. I really don't know.
One last thing that I see in D Jr's letter, perhaps the most important point of all -- but also the most obvious, so I'm sure I hardly need to say it. But she obviously loves you very, very much. Nobody who did not care deeply about you could possibly write in such a way.
I don't know what D thinks of any of this. As I say, I haven't heard from her since. She may think it is all bullshit, for all I know. I do know that I had no idea what I was going to write before I started; so I also haven't had a lot of time to figure out if it is any good or even makes any sense. But I offer it to you all for whatever it may be worth ....
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