After I lost my position as a college professor in the summer of 2018, I found myself once again on the job market. Finding another position at a school where my talents and perspectives would be a good fit would have meant uprooting our family. We had lived here in this small central Ohio town for most of a decade and had put down some roots. Our youngest daughter had known no other home. Our oldest had lived in this place, in this house, since she was 3. We didn’t want to move.
I applied for all sorts of local jobs, looking for work that could sustain our family. Finding something was harder than I would have expected, especially in an up economy. Finally, the first job that materialized was a position slicing meats and cheeses in a nearby market. It would have been easy to think of this change as a fall, a defeat, a humiliation. Fortunately, I was able to see through the surface of the work to something deeper, which spared me from falling into the trap of resentment.
