Going where I have to go

"This is how the career ends. Not with a retirement party and a gold watch but with a second career in the gig economy." --Reuven Perlman, "How Other Things End" in the Sept. 22 New Yorker.

What I'm telling myself this morning: I may have had a bizarre day that revealed once again the appalling level of incompetence running rampant in the universe, and I may have left my umbrella in the library so that I had to run through this morning's badly-needed rain without protection, and I may be required to give up my lunch hour to meet with someone I've never heard of to deal with an issue that does not concern me, and I may be facing students who think it's cute to ask out loud in class things like "I'm a computer science major--why do I have to learn to write?", BUT at least my job does not require me to be hit in the face with a 99-mile-per-hour fastball on live  television. Neither does it require me to instruct the editor of the AP story about David Fry's unfortunate injury that it is not correct to write that Fry "laid in the dirt for several minutes." He lay! Lay lay lay! This is not that difficult, people!

On the plus side, this morning my Nature Writing students discussed Annie Dillard's marvelous essay "Total Eclipse," which includes a quote from Theodore Roethke's poem "The Waking," which none of my students had read before so we took a look at it in class and examined how he uses end stops to reinforce the feeling of a person stumbling blindly down a poorly marked path, and I am taking the final verse as my marching orders for the brief amount of time left in my teaching career:

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   

What falls away is always. And is near.   

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   

I learn by going where I have to go.