Shh! Quiet, please...

Listen. Can you hear it? Block out all the other distractions and look up - can you hear the blue sky?

When you look up, how high does the sky seem to you during the day? Sometimes I forget the thin thickness of our atmosphere. I saw a photo taken by one of the space shuttle crew members during the recent visit to the Hubble space telescope this week and there in the photo a sliver of blue, like a thick hardback book cover, coated the surface of planet Earth.

We hear about global warming and see diagrams about heat-trapping gases bouncing UV radiation back to Earth, getting the idea in our thoughts that the atmosphere is taller than the Earth is thick.

Perspective changes everything, doesn't it?

I heard the sky today. I drove my mother in-law over to visit her granddaughter and she spent the whole trip exclaiming about how beautiful everything seems and how gorgeous the sky was. She's 91 years old (I keep thinking she's 92) and yet she still finds a clear, blue sky just as wonderful as when she was a child always looking up. That, my friends and colleagues, is the sky speaking to you - I hope you look up and hear it, too!

I threw away some money today to pay to sit in a theater by myself, drinking a carbonated soda from a waxed paper cup, eating popcorn out of a paper bag, and watching a movie called "Sunshine Cleaning."

The movie's plot you can read about on other websites. I grew up on the edge of the lives of the people in the movie, having worked in jobs similar to the ones performed by the movie characters. Working class jobs, as they say. The students/customers in my courses at the institute, many or most of them, work in similar jobs.

My family has roots in working class jobs. Many of my living relatives have or had worked in hourly wage jobs tied to the minimum wage, so-called nonexempt jobs (eligible for overtime pay).

Yet I was raised to expect something "better" of myself. It was looked down on to work for others as a laborer. Many of my secondary school friends were given summer jobs as laborers at factories where their fathers were engineers, scientists or managers so that they could see the difference between an uneducated worker and an educated one. This type of workplace "education" was supposed to enlighten us and cause us to concentrate our efforts on expanding our learning in order to acquire valuable work skills.

I am in a classification of people who have the brain power to perform complex mental tasks but not the burning desire to push ourselves to work in highly-paid jobs all the time.

Why am I here in this class? At first, I thought it was because I am lazy and spent years punishing myself mentally for not participating in the rote work that my neighbors seem to enjoy. From their perspective, I am lazy because actions speak louder than words and I don't spend a lot of time working around the yard, fixing the house or performing other domestic duties. From my parents' perspective, I didn't get the engineering or science degree that my test-taking skills implied I'd master. From my perspective, it's because I don't buy into the whole purpose of building a more complex society.

I am this one guy with limited thought-processing capabilities, who's not always detail-oriented and who takes a partial, high-level, "big picture" view of life. I am, and obviously it's not enough.

I contemplate my next move. I have held menial labor jobs, clerk-level jobs, management jobs, business ownership jobs and now a teaching job. I think I'm jobbed out. In my youth, I read an illustrated book and saw an animated movie about a fantasy version of the King Arthur tale, where Merlin transforms Arthur into the bodies of nonhuman animals (a universal hero transformation tale found in all cultures). I wanted to have that kind of life but knew I'd never be a nonhuman animal. Instead, I've tranformed into various human animal embodiments, a type of reincarnation or rebirth, if you will.

I am not a religious person. I expect nothing more than what my body can sense as long as it is alive and my brain functions normally, maintaining the sense of self I've carried with me up to now. I have no myths to perpetuate, no children to persuade. I have nothing to gain and nothing to lose. The remainder of my life includes continual deterioration of my body functions, leading to death. I may have one second or one hundred years before I die - I do not know.

What do I do next? As always, I learn. I find something new to occupy myself. I take my time, keeping my balance between slow steps, feeling the wind in my face and on the bottom of each foot as it hangs in the air, sensing the tension and release of every muscle cell. I enjoy the moment, which is all I have. I sit and listen to the sky.