On my way to work recently, I heard on NPR that 55 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with their jobs.
I’ve been thinking about that as other things happened this week:
1. I got in a car accident.
It could have been worse than it was. A black BMW pulled out right in front of me on Speer, and when I slammed on the breaks, an ugly station wagon hit me from behind. While I rubbed my neck and the man who hit me asked if I was OK, the driver of the Beemer sped off.
2. On my lunch break, I found somewhere where I wouldn’t look too creepy, and finished a book in my car.
The book was Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” and I was reading it across from a park where two men were rambling around, and a woman was cutting through the snow with a big black dog on a leash.
In an effort to go unnoticed, I kept reading Didion’s book (written the year after her husband of 40 years died from a heart attack), and I came to a stop at one line in particular: “I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death.”
I thought about the man who hit me and sped off. I thought about how many things I want to do and how little I’m satisfied during the hours when the sun is up. When I left teaching, I thought I wanted something easier. I was wrong.
If Didion is right, if we have convinced ourselves that we can avoid death, then maybe that’s where this widespread complacency comes from: we are so certain that death will not prematurely visit us that stop signs and speed limits are optional. Other people are expendable. We allow our hours themselves — 40 or more of them on weekly basis — to be filled with non-fulfillment.
To be discreet in a car in the middle of winter, there is the problem of heat. When I started my car, the men in the park both looked west to where I sat, to where the sky had started into a pool of warm, orange gray. I slunk into my seat, then heard a weighted clack. The man in the plaid shirt lowered his arm from what must have been a toss. A round brown ball rolled up to a red one. They continued, smiles going strong, alternately aiming the balls in heavy arcs towards the one on the ground.
I bookmarked Didion, realizing they were playing bocce, a game we used to play with my grandma on the banks of a pine-tree-lined river before I knew that longing can be for simple things, like tossing bocce balls at each other in the light of a late afternoon, or, more simply, just the light of the afternoon.
3. In light of the light, and in light of the car accident, and in light of thinking about how to not be as complacent as I know I’m inclined to be, I decided to quit my job.
I know unemployment is a dark place. I’ve been there before, and I know the sadness that can pervade. My dad was unemployed for two years when I was growing up, and it made our whole family sad. His company moved headquarters and he sacrificed his job so that my brothers and I could stay at our schools. Five of us lived on a nurse’s income. I don’t know how we did it, but I guess that’s how I do most things, without knowing what will work out and what won’t.
Now, my dad makes less, but good people depend on him. He eats lunch at home, saves money for small projects. He taught me that a high-maintenance life will be fraught with the fear of loss. My husband is a fisherman for part of the year in Alaska, and he would never trade the ocean for a high-rise, nor a million-dollar paycheck for 10 years of work on the water. Even though we have stacks of bills (boat, loans, grad school), he looked at me the other night and said, “I know it doesn’t make much money, but I need to fish. It’s too much a part of who I am for me to do anything different.”
These are the people from whom I’ve learned how to live.
So here it is, this column, my one-week notice.
Didion’s late husband used to say to her, frequently, “What if you’re wrong?” I asked myself the same thing, but like Didion, I know I’m right. I can’t be in that 55 percent. If I keep on keeping on, I’ll forget that I wake to a world I might be leaving soon.
If I’m dying every day, I want to be dying in the right direction.
Megan Nix () of Denver can be reached at thenixionary@gmail.com.
