writer/educator seeks viable life of creativity and mindfulness

Welcome to the chronicle of my quest to prove that the pursuit of passion can entail a sustainable income. Along the way, I hope you’ll enjoy my ramblings on Sudbury schooling, Zen, and the joy of writing.

If something here somehow intrigues, confuses, or bothers you, I invite you to leave a comment—though hopefully framed in such a way as to enhance, rather than hinder, fruitful dialogue. After all, one of my main goals here is to stimulate conversation and new ideas, not listen to myself talk.

“Now,” to quote Maurice Sendak, “let the wild rumpus start!”

What I (Don’t) Like About You

Following up on yesterday’s post, I want to go a bit more deeply into some basic features of my current job. As I said yesterday, this must necessarily obscure some details, as I am not yet ready to shed my ten-carat golden handcuffs. (Saying even this much makes me a little nervous.) But if I’m to get anywhere these thoughts, I need to take this next step. 

A Rat in a Cage

The physical environment of my office is such that, even if the work were fulfilling, I’d still feel soul-weary at the end of each day. There are no windows, the only lighting is fluorescent, and I stare at two computer screens all day. Even better, this hermetically sealed box sits in a maze of hallways reminiscent of the show Severance.

Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto

The vast majority of my tasks are robotic: detailed and tedious, with a great deal of repetition. A normal cycle goes something like this: download a file; save it to a folder; upload it to a database; then note in a spreadsheet that you have done these things. This cycle plays out dozens of times each for dozens of people. 

When it’s not tedious, chances are that’s because the process in question is a black box, with poor or nonexistent or outdated instructions. Computers are powerful, yes, but also powerfully frustrating, and the many programs and platforms we use rarely play well together. 

Like I Was a Spectator

I don’t mind grunt work or tedious tasks per se; I understand and fully accept the necessity of chores and meetings, cleaning and organizing, work that is neither interesting nor creative. What I object to is when that’s the overwhelming majority of what I do at work. What’s even worse is when the decisions that shape my work life are made elsewhere, for me, often by anonymous, faceless authorities, without my participation or even my voice. When I attend meetings that are basically lectures, where other people are making decisions but about which I rarely have any meaningful input, because my role is merely to implement what they decide.  

And You May Ask Yourself, Well, How Did I Get Here?

I know I was spoiled by many years of staffing at Sudbury schools, small, nonhierarchical nonprofits striving to allow young people to develop and mature into the best possible versions of themselves, growing up healthy, capable, and responsible. My Sudbury work was everything my current job is not: it made me larger, it brought me joy and connection, it heaped purpose and meaning upon me. 

And yet, if that work had been able to take care of me materially, I doubt I’d ever have wound up where I am today. Not that I resent the marvelously meandering path I’ve followed, but as for where I currently find myself, well, to quote Dr. Horrible…

An Exchange, Purely Mathematical

“His employment, as he was coming to understand, was starkly factual and economic: an exchange, purely mathematical, of so much work for so much money, an arrangement, he began to see, that he could not love. He did not love his work.”

~ Wendell Berry, Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It’s been three years since my last blog post.

Well, nearly, and sort of. Prior to a couple weeks ago, the last time I posted here was January 2023: nearly three years ago, a few weeks before I started my current job. Despite gaps in blogging being my norm, one this long seems surprising and saddening. 

And very telling. What it tells, well…I’m not sure how much of that I can, or should, share. As much as I dislike my job (most of it, at least), my mortgage and a chronic health condition render  me rather dependent on the income and benefits of full-time employment. Thus I am averse to putting that dependence on the line by revealing too much about where I work and what I do. 

Suffice to say, in the words of Wendell Berry this job is “an exchange, purely mathematical,” an arrangement I cannot love. In a nutshell, I spend most of my workdays shuffling digital paperwork — downloading, uploading, filing, and notating that workflow. I copy and paste between databases that haven’t yet learned to communicate directly. Often I feel like the 21st century equivalent of the early Industrial Revolution worker, standing in front of a large, complicated machine in order to press a button every now and then to keep it doing its thing. 

Unlike my years in Sudbury schools, there is virtually no room in this job for creativity — nor do I have any real sense of agency. Variety and meaningfulness? Forget about it.  I have gone from small, nonhierarchical nonprofits to a vast, impersonal bureaucracy in which not only do I have no voice in the decisions shaping my work life, often I don’t even know who makes those decisions. I regularly attend meetings that are actually lectures, where I am no more than a passive spectator. 

Worst of all, I do not see anything better out there. With regard to jobs that seem a good fit for my interests, skills, and experience, for months now I’ve seen just the tiniest handful of openings that combine steady work with decent pay and benefits. I’m left suspecting that this market offers job seekers a Sophie’s choice: worthwhile work or reasonable compensation, one or the other, not both. 

For much of my life, I opted for work I loved that couldn’t offer me steady pay; lately I’ve gone the other direction, with work I can barely tolerate in exchange for some measure of material security. But this doesn’t seem any better in the long run. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I often feel as though I’m selling my soul — or at least, sacrificing my days — for the sake of having a house and health care. I don’t have much autonomy, I don’t get to be creative, but at least I don’t have to be anxious about paying my bills. 

After three years, I wonder how much longer I can keep this up, chaining myself to a desk in a windowless office, administering a self-lobotomy on a daily basis, just for the sake of a greasy buck. I can’t help thinking there has to be something better. There has to be a way out of this; there has to be a better way of doing things — not just for me, but for all of us. But where, and how? 

Writing My Way Out

“Part fact part fiction is what my life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.”

~ Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Waves of words, interspersed by long, tide-free gaps which end with a resolve to write more regularly — this is the story of this blog.

Writing, or more broadly, wordsmithing, is what I’ve always done (or long done, anyway). Reading and scribbling and tweaking and polishing, finding out in the process what’s true, or at least what I believe. The question is why it’s been so easy for me to get away from something so central to my identity (and remain there indefinitely). 

In part, I suspect, it’s perfectionism, along with an awareness that not all my thoughts need to be put into words. (I swear, I do have a filter sometimes.) Then there’s the difficulty of finding those rare coincidences of free time and inspiration, or at least, willingness to sit down and face the blank page/screen. The challenge of being real while not disclosing too much to people who shouldn’t hear some of those thoughts also plays into my curious, reluctant silence. 

This has never been a satisfying arrangement, holding at arm’s length that which feeds me, but it often seems unavoidable. Still, I can’t accept that. I have too much that needs sorted, and for me, hurling words together seems an indispensable means of approaching that goal. 

As comfortable as my life is in many ways, as privileged as I surely am, the issues weighing me down are many and imposing. I have got to get back to wrestling with them verbally, on a frequent (ideally, daily) basis. Shorter bursts of words, perhaps; less polished posts, but more of them; not careless, but not essays, either. 

I’ve got to write my way out.

Stay tuned.

“I’ll write my way out 

Write ev’rything down, far as I can see

I’ll write my way out

Overwhelm them with honesty”

~ Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

The Need for Work

If you’ve been following this blog at all, you already know that I’ve been looking for work for a few months now — long enough to have generated a handful of thoughts and observations on the process. I’ve reflected on how much I enjoy having so much time to myself, my ambivalence about dipping my toe back into public education, and vague outlines of what I might do if I could write my own job ticket.

There’s a deeper issue here that I want to explore today: what does it mean to say, “I need a job.”

My Monty Hall Problem

I suspect many of you are too young to remember the original version of “Let’s Make a Deal” (hosted by Monty Hall), but the segment that made it a fixture in the pop culture lexicon had contestants (many dressed in costumes) choose whatever prizes lay hidden behind Door #1, Door #2, or Door #3.

(Interestingly, I just learned there’s a brain teaser, a probability puzzle called The Monty Hall Problem, that imagines a new car behind one door and goats behind the other two. The question is whether it’s better to switch your initial choice after seeing that one of the two doors you initially passed over concealed a goat.)

I don’t have a Monty Hall problem, exactly, but I do have three leading choices for projects I might develop. These choices aren’t mutually exclusive — I could pursue two, or all three — but my time is of course finite, and I can’t know for sure the opportunity costs of choosing to invest in or another combination. There’s also the question of income, as a fourth claim on my time — paying work —will have to compete with these projects until such time as they become self-supporting. So today I’d like to sketch the outlines of the prizes behind my three doors, in the hope that either my writing or your comments will fill in enough of the implications that I can make a more informed choice.

Toward a Narrative Résumé

As I drift through these weeks of near-total unemployment, every now and then I recall that it might help to clarify just what it is that I want to do for work, and what I do well. Here, then, is a stab at articulating a few things I enjoy and for which I seem to have some aptitude. With a nod to humility, I should emphasize that this is not simply tooting my own horn; these have all been identified as strengths by others too often for me to believe it’s just wishful thinking.

To Sub, or Not to Sub

Given my background and the situations with both my career and the local school district, it would seem that becoming a substitute teacher is a no-brainer.

Would that it were that simple.

At the school where I’d student-taught and would later be hired full-time

When I was in grad school preparing to become a teacher, and then during the gap between getting certified and getting my own classroom, I subbed more times than I could possibly count. Over this three-year period (including student-teaching), I got more and better training in how to actually teach, how to be with students and how to handle chaos, than pretty much anything in my 2.5 years of formal teacher training.

By the end of that time, I was subbing daily, teachers were fighting to get me to cover their classes, and I enjoyed a ten-week maternity leave assignment that gave me a taste of having my own classroom, teaching the same students, the same subjects, day after day.

Granted, all that was over 25 years ago, but what I have been doing in that intervening time? Mostly working with more and more students (albeit in very different sorts of schools). Right now, the demand for subs here is so great that, for the first time in my life, I’m seeing signs in front of every school saying that they need subs (with a URL for more information). It’s maybe not the best money, but what other job allows you to work only on days you feel like it? And “work”? Back in the day, at least, the bulk of my subbing tasks could be captured in the following nutshell: take attendance, manage the hall pass, pass out the worksheet/quiz/test, press PLAY and STOP for the video.

In all fairness, I was good. And mostly, I enjoyed it. Yet here I am, over a year since my return to Columbia, and I haven’t so much as applied to become a sub. Why?

Some of My Best Friends…

The more I (hopefully) get back into blogging, the more I promote these posts on social media, the more an ancient bogeyman stirs: what I really think about conventional education, and people’s reactions to that, and the effects on our relationships.

I learned long, long ago that education is right up there with religion and politics as a sensitive topic; I’ve often half-joked that debating who’s in charge of the universe or the country is nothing compared to saying how you think young people should be raised.

Early in my Sudbury years I was possessed by a sort of missionary zeal —understandable, perhaps, given where I’d come from, but it cost me years of one of my closest friendships, with someone I’d known in my first professional job at a public high school. We eventually reconciled, thank goodness, but given that she died a few years after that, my relief is tempered by a haunting sense of what was lost, what might have been.

In part due to this experience, I’ve learned over the years to temper that youthful zeal, to view things from a broader, more realistic perspective. It’s brought considerable relief to realize that I don’t have to, can’t, and shouldn’t tell anyone else what form of education is best for their family at any given moment. I will never know enough, the complexity and nuance are too great, and besides, the freedom I want to put at the heart of learning prevents me from constraining others’ choices.

And yet…

Public Daydreaming

Regarding my work, I’m starting to suspect that waiting until I have some clue what I’m doing may not be the way to get things moving. I don’t want to work a job that I only do for the money — I know this. As for what I do want, where my passions might possibly intersect with income-generating activity, lately that seems to fall into three categories…

True or False: I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

I don’t want to do a damn thing today.

That might not be entirely true.

I won’t lie about this: there are parts of being unemployed that I really, really like. Being able to get enough sleep, driving/leaving home a lot less, abundant quiet, more time to read and write and run, vastly more flexibility in my non-schedule. Basically, I’m enjoying some rough equivalent of retirement while I’m still young enough not to have age interfere with the enjoyment. Even my currently minimal income, while not pleasant, is totally in keeping with this premature retirement story.

Yet my current situation is far from viable