"Visions of Vocation" by Dr. Joe Milan

“Once Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up, and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he were Zhuang Zhou who had dreamed he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou… This is called the Transformation of Things.” – Zhuangzi, Chapter 2, Translation by Burton Watson.

 I was destined for L.A. All through college, I had grunted 5k lights up onto C-stands, built camera cranes, and slapped cassettes into DAT decks while booming furry mics above actors’ heads on TV commercial sets. My dream was to be a director. I needed to be the one behind the cameras, telling the actors to talk faster–to be a Scorsese, a Spike or Ang Lee–a name on a Hollywood star. L.A. was the dream.
 But when I graduated college in Seattle, right before my twenty-second birthday, my father asked me “to come home. We need help.” Mom was sick, dying. In the silence, over the phone, I could hear him on the big back porch with parrots squawking high up in the blue Hawaiian sky. My college girlfriend, a woman with fabulous curls who I loved with the big-hearted ache of a Valentine, said she’d wait for me in L.A. So, I flew to paradise because mom was dying.
 I won’t tell you about the disease other than it is one of the many diseases that we’ve known about for a long time but haven’t funded much to research, much less cure. Doctors didn’t know if she’d live six months or six years. For months, my duties were researching her disease, calling hospitals, filling out forms, chauffeuring, laundering, and all the other little things you do when one you love is worn out and knows time is short.
 And it was hard. And I was angry. I was shut in the house of diagnosing, testing, cleaning, and comforting–waiting for the terrible thing to happen to someone else, unable to plan a day ahead. When I could, I went to the water of Barber’s Point and bobbed on my Bodyboard while staring out on an ocean bruised in tints of green and blue and black.
 I waited for my big wave to come. One day, right before a storm, it did.
 Waves come in sets. The trick for boarding is to aim for the middle of the set, the biggest wave, often the third wave, so if you bite it, you don’t get buried too badly in the churn of the smaller waves that follow.
 And I caught a third wave. It was huge for me, maybe ten feet, but I had never gone so fast. The wave rose and kept rising. It wouldn’t crest. It wasn’t tubing. It just grew, and I just knew that there were rocks right under, and I pushed my weight a little too far forward, and I bit it badly, skidding for a moment with the wave. And then, I'm under. My leash is loose. My board is gone, and I'm spinning, and it’s sand and bubbles and salt, and I bang my knee on some sharp rock, and then, everything skips. A jump cut in a film–one moment you’re here, the next you’re looking up, and it’s inky and cold and deep, and there’s a new set of waves passing overhead. Cold needled my body. My lungs burned for air. Air was way up there, so far away, so dark in the middle of the day.
 Somehow, I got up to the surface. I was gasping and hurling seawater and snot. But I could feel the sandy bottom when I pointed my toes. The waves had spat me away from the rocks that had banged me up, could’ve killed me.
 Then I reached up to my neck, feeling for my chain. At sixteen, on the day my dad left for Hawaii for his big-shot-dream job, he gave me his chain in that cliche way of saying I was the man of the house. Which was funny even then because, at sixteen, I was no man. I was a little shit doing donuts in mall parking lots at the dark of night, smoking weed, downing beer, and trying to convince all the honeys that their chariot was here. Even so, in that dense head of mine, I sensed something had changed with the turnover of that chain–it was time to be useful.
 Now I lost it. And I was bleeding from my knee, throwing up, and bigger waves were coming. Sharks were always near. I knew I should get on the beach. But I dove under, looking for that chain. In the salt murk, I saw a lone coral fan, a big pink hand-looking thing sticking up from the sand. It held this chain in between the two of its fingers. I snatched it, swam with the waves the best I could, clutching this chain, and got to the beach.
 A beach bum had been watching me. He had my board. "What you doing?" he said.
 "Boogie-ing," I said.
 "Mainlander? You all crazy. Don't know what to do with yourself here."
 "Had to get my chain."
 "You’re bleeding!"
 I was bleeding, not just from my knee but from my eyebrow, from somewhere near the crown of my head. Back at my mom's car, under some towels, sat on the warm pavement, and leaned back against the fender in the humid air and the smell of rotting candle nuts. I hid my head in a towel, spat on the pavement, and wondered: how did I make it back? The rocks would’ve been way out there, forty or fifty yards, and my chain would've broken when everything else did. How could my chain be right there on the fan? Why was it so dark underwater yet so close to shore?
 We live lives like we don’t know we’re going to die. Even when you’ve touched the cold skin that doesn’t give as it should. Because there is later. We couldn’t function now if we had to concentrate on dying just like we couldn't function if we had to concentrate to breathe. Somewhere along the line, we learn that to live well is to work a job that others would say was a good job, to buy shit that others can’t have, for those others to say I wish I lived good. When life scapes close to the knives, you relearn that you’re going to die, that fate wasn’t something you could plan, and how cool the air feels drawing into your nose, back to your throat, and the rise and fall of your chest. That was life.
 Shouldn’t helping others in life be enough for happiness?
 Waves crashed. The air got cold with the first spitting of rain, and I clutched the chain. Looking up at the ocean spray misting the beach, I only knew that the ocean touched all these places I had only seen on maps. I wanted to know what was out there before I died.
 That night, steeped in whiskey, I started writing, scribbling. It was terrible, but I liked how writing clarified my thoughts, conjured the thoughts and dreams I never knew lurked deep inside. It would take another couple of years, before I started to seriously write. But at this moment, writing translated the guttural nonsense in my head couldn’t. A new life started to plot itself: I wanted to fill in maps with stories worth telling. I wanted to be useful to others, somehow. These quaint – as I now see them – scribbles were thoughts fit for a hangover afternoon, overwrought, like navel gazing from a black sand beach, then peering at the gorgeous sunbeams blasting over the ocean and cutting through the mist of water and snot sprayed from the blow hole of some massive, majestic whale all morphing into rainbows. Real inspirational rainbows, not from the ass of a unicorn on a poster. To be out there, somehow, meant that I would be able to be something more to myself and others, helping people, having epiphanies that make you feel guilty for having a hangover thundering away in the skull and complaining about the magical black sand gritting the folds of your skin.
 I continued to help mom, and I was happier to do it. Luckily, my mom stabilized. She would never be well, but she was healthy enough to tell me to go on my own journey. But instead of flying to LA, I decided to go abroad, to travel, and to start by filling in the backstory of what I thought it meant to be Korean American. I worked in a grim USPS processing center and saved enough money to do the thing that I figured out was my ticket abroad: teaching.
 I asked my girlfriend with the fabulous curls to come with me. Her dream was to become a child psychologist. A grad school in L.A.–where we were supposed to be–had accepted her. But there was a whole big world out there, I told her. She said there was a whole world right there.
 She stayed; I left.
 I worked for a British company, teaching adults English to help them get jobs, and to study abroad. My mentors trained me well enough to jump ship and become a laughably young twenty-four-year-old instructor at a Korean National Education University, where I trained future school teachers. In teaching, I learned the only thing that matters is what the student does to learn, not so much what we do to teach. When you help make learning happen, you’ve done your job. And it felt good and right and still does, even though the pay is appalling.
 Frederick Buechner, author of A Long Day’s Dying, defined vocation as “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” That phrase has stuck with me since I heard it because it hints at a thing that we rarely acknowledge: the dream job we think we’re fated for probably isn’t the vocation we’re destined for. Growing up, I never considered being a writer, much less a teacher. But the deep gladness I feel when I conjure a dream for you and me to share, the feeling that I’ve done something good with a student by helping them learn, seems right. Maybe my vocation is to message all of you who may be whisps of imagination from butterflies on the prairie of the mind: we are all part of the transformation of things. And there’s no plan for that.

             
Joe Milan, Jr. is a literary escapee of the wastelands of the military-industrial complex. He dreamed of exposing his beautiful self to others through pole dancing. Having cowered to do that, he decided to ply his moves to teaching and writing fictions. He taught at Waldorf University from 2020 - 2024 — under the pen name of Dr. Joe Milan. He is the author of The All-American and teaches Creative Writing at Hollins University in Roanoke, Va.