Seize the Day
Two related stories:
The first: On a beach in Costa Rica a week or so ago, I struck up a conversation with another vacationer, a guy in his early 40’s who was walking with his daughters, who looked to be about the same age as my granddaughters. Just beach talk, until–after his daughters went into the water–he asked me what I did for a living. When I told him I reported about education, he had a curious response: Is that what you’ve always wanted to do, he wanted to know? Yes, I answered, and because I was once a teacher, education was a natural choice of a beat to cover. You’re lucky, he said, and then proceeded to tell me about his work as some sort of mortgage banker. His firm invested in homes where the mortgages were ‘underwater’ and tried to restructure with the current owners. When that did not work (which was most of the time), his company paid the owners $20,000 or so to walk away from the debt and their home. He said it was a $6 billion business, and that his company owned ‘more homes than you can imagine.’
He went on. This isn’t what I want to be doing, he said. If I could, I would be remodeling old homes and reselling them, one at a time, with a good buddy of mine. That’s been my dream job forever, he said, but I have to make money. He gestured toward his daughters. School, later college, all that stuff, he sighed.
I’m 40, he said, so it’s probably too late for me to change. Because it wasn’t my place to contradict him or encourage him to follow his passion, I said nothing. Basically, I chalked it up to one of those conversations between strangers, where they feel free to say stuff they don’t or can’t talk about with friends and family.
The second story is about Vivian Connell, who taught high school English, ESL, and Japanese, for two decades. She is about the same age as the man on the beach, and, like him, she was dissatisfied at work. And so a few years ago she followed her intuition/heart/gut and made a huge change. By all reports an effective teacher, she came to believe that her chosen profession was being denigrated by powerful