The call to adventure

There is no shortage of work to be done in this country. There is just a shortage of money to pay for it. A recent news story told of many laid-off workers who had previously held very good jobs but now are volunteering for nonprofit organizations. They are bringing their advanced education and years of experience to groups that are grateful for their help. Why are they working for nothing? Apparently to feel useful, to fill the time, and to make contacts that might lead to paying jobs.

College students have also been working for nothing in recent years. Colleges called these jobs “internships.” They were supposed to offer real-world work experience, and they did, in varying degrees, but it always made me a little nervous that we were using their labor and paying them nothing. Would that not depress wages for people who were actually being paid? Would that not disadvantage students who simply had to have paying jobs in order to go to college at all? Is this exploitation? The point may become moot if the jobs that used to go to college interns go to laid-off executives with years of experience. I never thought I would see students and aging, white collar workers battling it out over jobs with no paycheck.

Paid work has vanished at an astonishing rate during this recession, but full-time jobs with living wages and medical benefits have been harder and harder to get for a long time. In higher education, colleges and universities increasingly rely on adjunct professors. These teachers do the same work as regular professors, but some are part-time and rarely do they get benefits. Corporations cut middle management to the bone. These were the jobs college graduates in the 1960s and 1970s built their careers on. They vanished. Now finance has been cut to ribbons. It isn’t clear how in the world people are supposed to make a living. People have flocked to health care and education, but education budgets are being cut. Teachers are being laid off or simply not replaced. 

I wonder how many people who still have money and jobs are helping relatives or friends who have lost their incomes.  Life is being restructured. It is not obvious where we are going or what we are supposed to do. We have marched off the map.

A friend of mine who has had a hard life with many nasty surprises once said, “I told God I wanted an interesting life. I think I should have been more specific.” We live in interesting times. A financial wildfire has played havoc with any sense of security we once had. We had developed finely tuned skills to negotiate the world as we knew it.  We haven’t developed skills or much experience for living in this world. 

I think it is perfectly all right to howl and rage at what has happened. But after we get through raging and weeping, we have to figure out how to live here now. The bad news is that it is not obvious. The good news is that it is not obvious. We get to invent it. We have to invent it.

I think I am going to need a sense of adventure, and this does not come naturally to me. I come from cautious people. My father bought what might have been the first Ford with a padded dashboard and “safety belts” as they were called in 1956.  We look before we leap. I might watch Indiana Jones on the big screen, but I never wanted to be Indiana Jones.

I once borrowed a book from a friend and in the margins she had repeatedly written “HAT.” I asked her why. She said, “Oh, it means:  How about that!” I need a how-about-that spirit. A financial wildfire is sweeping the globe. The world is being remade, and I am smack dab in the middle of it. It is terrifying. I am trying to see myself as an adventurer in one of the greatest transformations in history. Do you think that if I wear one of those Indiana Jones hats and play the theme music every morning just after my Grape Nuts and coffee, I could pull it off? 

Patricia Hunt, of Staunton, is a chaplain at Mary Baldwin College.