Calculations

It rained last night on the drive back to my town. It was dark and there was silent lightning in the distant North East. The day ended at the school with a small hush of the fans and clang of the gate. A group of the final students waited out on the sidewalk for a ride, or for maybe nothing at all. They are small town kids with the aimless manner of all small town teens. The merits of the local pizza place and the endless nothing else to do were the most popular topics of discussion. One girl told me she only lives in the present. I told her this sounded like the best way to avoid going crazy in a small town and not so much a philosophy. She said maybe.

The roads were pot-holed but straight. The red clay tinted trucks moved slowly and owned the whole lane. Waves of dust flapped across the headlights in the cross winds and the diesel of the trucks burned loudly. Daniela, the owner of the school, drove, and Eidmar, the postman who learns last in the day after doing his route, sat red eyed in the back waiting for Daniela to switch to Portuguese. She had a lot to say: the troubles of finding a new secretary, the students who do not keep studying, the man coming to visit from San Paulo with no one new he can train and of course the stubborn parents. I was listening half way; she was in a monologue anyhow. I was thinking about money. I don’t really know what I will earn, but it surely will not be much. There seems to be more demand for my time than I can supply, which is no bad problem. But even so, while it’s enough here, it’s not enough for much else. Earlier, Daniela was asking me why I will return to the United States. She made her case about the lifestyle, the teaching, the people, and the food. I told her it’s true, that I could, it’s possible to just settle in and reap the easy rewards. But I told her I knew I would not. So as she talked, I was thinking about money.

Thus far I am much more at ease. There is some levity to these little towns that might feel grating in the wrong perspective, or grow boring, but for me I hit it just right. It’s the right tempo for me now, and I can feel at peace. Compared with the ulcerous feeling I maintained in Korea, or the treadmill of America, a person feels fine just surviving the heat and lingering in a conversation and dripping some fruit juice down one’s chin. But, and this is what I was thinking about while staring out into the fields, how do you calculate that? I mean, clearly I took a hit in pay to come here, and one might take the difference and measure that against the costs to arrive, look at the overall discrepancy and then use that as some means to ground the value of living here. But the calculation just feels too slippery. So, how can you really account for the value of a way of life? I knew the gist of my lifestyle here already, but if one really had to make a more blind decision about the value of living a certain way, a better way, and measure it against the difference in dollars, how can one possibly attack that with a sort of logic? At what cost is it worth to live how we want to live? Not just to say in one’s dreams or by a campfire, how it all should be, but actually to weigh and measure the abstract differences in a practical way. If you frame the discussion just right it starts to answer itself. In the right light it seems like nothing could be more important, once we land on what we want. Outside of that clarity though, which is when most of the small decisions that add up to a lifestyle are made, there are lots of reasons to digress. If you are lucky enough to choose, what do you put in that deciding column: lightness in the shoulders, patience, a settled stomach? Is that really logical? Still, I think it’s not incompatible with a logical decision, just that I don’t know how to measure it. But, I guess it’s impossible not to think about--when it’s late and she is still talking while the clouds flash quietly--exactly how long I could keep using this road.