This Latest Heart Attack

The Banks of Quaker Lake in January

I’m standing on the edge of Quaker Lake in Allegany State Park in Western New York. Snow is falling around me and the lake has iced over. Way out in the middle of the ice, crows huddle together in the safety that can come from being able to see all around them, and being ready to fly, and I am feeling as unsafe as I have in a very long time.

Today, I am resigning from my professorship at Mt. San Antonio College where I have worked for twenty-five years. Today, I am moving past that security into this new world without a clue about what’s in front of me. Today, I am thinking about California and my family and friends who still live there. Today, I am thinking about a heart attack that I didn’t know I had, but my cardiologist could see in the readout from an EKG.

I think a lot of people took a deep breath and thought about who they were and what they wanted during the pandemic. I did. I can remember telling my wife that I didn’t know what was ahead of us except that something inside me told me that if I didn’t quit, I wasn’t going to live until retirement. 

It turns out that I was probably right. 

And I think I know when the heart attack happened. I remember the pain and the feeling of electricity shooting through me at the end of a particularly hard semester. The demands of the semester had been relentless, and the needs of the school, my colleagues, and my students came before my needs or my family. That was the culture of the college, and it’s the culture of so many places people work in the United States. It was a culture of 70 hour work-weeks and endless needs and complaints. It was a culture that drove me every evening to alcohol and inevitably to poor health and a heart attack.

But today, I am standing on the edge of Quaker Lake doing nothing but watching the snow settle on the ice around those crows, and I am unmoored from the constant crashing through life.

In my life, in a lot of working people’s lives in the United States, security leads to a heart attack and insecurity leads to mindfulness. And still, I was lucky, and I feel lucky to have had my profession. So many people in education, so many incredibly talented professors, do not have that security. They are asked to work at the same level without decent pay or benefits. They can be fired at will. 

So many people outside of education have lives that are much more difficult. They work endless hours too and kill themselves. The thing is that I don’t think it needs to be this hard on this many people. I don’t know why we have created a world of competition where we feel besieged. I don’t think it’s necessary or natural.

At least, now it doesn’t have to be this hard on me.

If I feel unmoored, if I feel that I’m drifting, at least that beats the driving that used to define my everyday life. I know that I will miss Mt. San Antonio College. I went there as a kid and then as a young man and then I worked there as an adult. Most of my life has been defined by my relationship to it, but now my life is going to be defined by something different. 

It will be wild and unmoored. 

I’m going to find it in my ambles through the woods.

Stay tuned.