Diary of a pre-certified teacher, Vol. VII: National Geographic Explorer

Why was I alive?

Sometimes when you have prepared for death and it doesn’t come, you find yourself asking: why am I alive? You have a purpose-driven-life moment. Appreciating time a lot more, you want to get down to the goal of what time you have left. It could be selling ant farms. It could be running for Congress. But you just kinda want to know what you’re here for and get on with it.

After I survived cancer that was diagnosed in 2008, I was ready to get on with my mission. A few years before I got sick, I had made what was either a bold move or a terrible mistake. I had left the workforce to write books. The plan was I would write the four books I wanted to, and then use them to find a job. I particularly wanted to work in the conservative movement, and the books reflected this. One was an expose of the alcoholic, libertine, communist Jesuits who taught me in high school. The other was about my grandfather, who had been a professional baseball player. The third was about sex, Catholicism and rock and roll. It was a defense of both Catholic teaching on human sexuality and rock and roll, which I argued reflected that very same teaching. This book had been accepted by a major publisher, and was in the editing pipeline when I got sick.

I wrote the three books. Then the recession hit. Then I got sick.

Having survived, I had to figure out what to do. I decided to go back to school to get a teaching certificate, but being a teacher means having a backup job. I wanted to work at Fox News, but they didn’t return my calls. So I tried National Geographic, where my father had worked. His had a grand life of travel and discovery and adventure; he had traveled the world and written about it, and actually discovered where Columbus landed, a small island in the Bahamas called Samana Cay. Yet it wasn’t 1965 anymore, or even 1995. Magazines and newspapers were laying people off. I checked the NatGeo website, where I saw an ad for “visitor service representatives” for the five months that a new exhibit would be in Washington. The job would be to check coats, tear tickets, politely herd people to proper locations and general do whatever needs to be done for the 2-3,000 people who come through the museum every day to see the Terra Cotta Warriors, life-sized, 2,000 year-old Chinese clay figures who have been the winter buzz of Washington. The figures, some 8,000 total—the Geographic has fifteen on display—were built by artisans around 200 BC. They were done at the order of China’s first dictator, Qin Shi Huang, and no two are alike. Their purpose was to both usher the emperor into the afterlife and protect him.

Since Fox was ignoring me, I took the Terra Cotta job. I would be a gopher, making people happy and protecting the protectors of the emperor. I could hack it, because for the first time in months I felt strong. To be sure, the chemo had caused some nerve and tissue damage, and according to my doctor it would take about a year for that to wear off. I would also be on a maintenance drug that was new and experimental, and for all I knew would turn me into the Hulk. But none of that was still nothing like the dreary, deadening fatigue I felt in the months leading up to December 2008, when I was diagnosed with cancer. No matter what happens in life, there is usually I sense of security that, if all else should fail, you still have your working body. You can change careers, move to a different state, botch a relationship, but at the end of the day you won’t starve. You can wash dishes, or fold clothes. But when your body itself begins to weaken and you don‘t know why, a desperation sets in. You don’t feel well enough to work, yet you don’t know why. When I was diagnosed, I was actually relieved. Anything was better than living like that.

And I could shake off the spiritual malaise that sets in when you can’t work. One of my heroes is Pope John Paul II, who had penetrating insights into the connection between work and spirituality. In 1940, when Poland was under Nazi occupation, the 20 year-old Karol Wojtyla went to work at the Zakrzowek quarry breaking up limestone. Up until then the future pope had believed, as he was taught as a boy, that hard work was a penalty of original sin. Yet seeing the dignity of the older workers, he came to a different conclusion. As Catholic intellectual George Weigel puts it in Witness to Hope, “[The pope saw that] work, with all its rigors and hardships, was a participation in God’s creativity, because work touched the very essence of the human being as a creature to whom God had given dominion over the earth.”