“The hardest years in life are those between 10 and 70.” –Helen Hayes (at 73)
Enough about this Y2K business; we need to face up to a more pervasive and horrifying prospect: M2K.
I learned about this other 2K from Gary Anderson, the ebullient director of the Career Development Center at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn. He was telling me of a recent speech he’d given, “How Parents Can Help Their Sons and Daughters Choose a Career,” and he started by putting up a slide that showed the number 2,000.
Naturally, the parents settled back, dutifully prepared for another dentist’s drill of a speech on–open wide–the New Millennium. But Anderson was toying with them. He explained the real significance of that number: Their sons and daughters would experience, over the course of their careers, 2,000 Mondays.
Anderson could see in the faces of those parents their knowing of the great, gray weight of a lifetime of Mondays. Maybe you can look at 50 or 100 of them and still sing out, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” But face up to four digits of Mondays and cute cliches fail you. To be forced to imagine your son or daughter living a little life, putting the “lock” into “clock,” is to moan, “Oh, Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be bureaucrats.”
To whom can our children look for wisdom? How many teachers delight in their profession? How many parents come home telling tales of joy? It was no surprise that many of the parents asked Anderson, “Is it too late for me?”
No. The advice is the same whether it’s 2,000 or 1,000 or 500 Mondays. Forget about some idiot list of Hot Jobs. Today’s Hot Job is tomorrow’s Midlife Crisis. Instead, discover where personal needs might intersect economic reality. (Sorry, poets.) But you know that advice, the old do-what-you-love song. Here’s the advanced version: Stop doing-what-you-loved. What every green graduate and every grizzled worker needs to accept is that even wise career choices don’t come with 2,000 Mondays of treadwear. Turns out that even good careers wear out, and only the most courageous refuse to wear out with them.
I present Exhibit A: David Pinkwasser, a man in his late 40s who gave up being a rabbi to become a flight attendant. He told me that after 26 years as a rabbi he had become an impersonation of the man he once was: “You do three funerals and two weddings in one day–you put on the smiley face, then the sad face, then back to the smiley one.” He began to confide his frustrations to his wife. To her credit, she didn’t say, “This, too, shall pass.” No, she reminded him that he used to say, “The one job I’d really love is being a flight attendant.”
And so he applied to the only airline he thought would suit him, Southwest. (“I’m a little off-center, and so are they.”) He didn’t think they’d seriously consider a 48-year-old former rabbi, so with his resume he sent pictures of himself hiking and bicycling and otherwise looking alive. (Not necessary, as it turned out. Among those in his training class was a woman of 61.)
Having grown up in a typical Midwestern setting–one where our family motto was, “What will people think?”–I had to wonder how difficult it had been for Pinkwasser to trade away the status of being a rabbi. He laughed. “Status? Keep it!” And he added, “When I see members of my former congregation, they seem startled and say, `You look so happy.’ And when I run into my former colleagues, they’re jealous. One of them said to me, `Every time I see you, I break the 10th commandment.’ ” Seeing my blank look, Pinkwasser added, “The one about coveting thy neighbor.”
Robert Louis Stevenson once pointed out that when a person “loves the labour of any trade apart from any question of success or fame, then the gods have called.” When choosing a first career or a second or third, one has to listen very carefully–turns out that most callings are whisperings. And they’re easiest to hear on Mondays.
