Other Things Worthy of Your Time
"America Reads Motivation Letter"
9/26/04
It wasn’t the struggling and difficult, would-be swimmers that seemed to be the only customers at the pool I worked at. It definitely wasn’t the winless little league team, which offered neither payment or prestige. If I had to think why I would go back to a source of a generous amount of stress I’ve had in the past, I couldn’t give you a sensible reason. Really, I can’t even name anything I physically gained from doing any of the things I did. And even with that said, I still considered applying for this opportunity as a volunteer, where I wouldn’t even receive payment for time.
There’s also the fact that, because of my schedule, every other night I get to approach the next day, knowing I don’t have any obligations in the morning, so I can have the night however I want it. If I worked these mornings, I’d lose the only times I got to spend, to put it delicately, in the elongated bliss of slumber. What a shame.
It really doesn’t seem all that reasonable, why I would want to neglect the type of stress-free-free-time I’d enjoy otherwise, but what motivates people in the first place is the thing in life that interests me most of all. Maybe I feel that if someone wants to act like they’ve matured, they have to be able to take the responsibility that comes with maturity. If I think I’m really all that grown up, it’s time I start acting like it. Or maybe I’m just ready and inclined to lead people in the right direction.
I won’t deny that back when I took the jobs I described in my application—the swimming instructor, and the little league coach—I wasn’t continuously excited by what they demanded. I was immature myself, and could take just about so much of people that had no reason to even try to behave themselves before I was slapping my forehead and shaking my head. They were kids. Kids act like kids. But I also can’t say that, even then, I wasn’t getting a degree of satisfaction from serving as a guide to other people’s progress.
This summer I had an experience, to put it lightly. I was swimming in the surf with a bunch of friends at Popham Beach in Maine. To avoid flattering myself or overly bragging, which I’m going to end up doing anyway, I’ll cut the story short: I brought in a kid who’d been caught in the undertow. I don’t know if he would have found it in himself to fight his way back in, or if someone else would have eventually seen him, but, as far as I know, I was the difference between this kid making it back in and drifting out to sea. Again, at the price of self-flattery, he was a few hundred feet out and only a couple of friends had even noticed me when I was gone. No one else was around him, besides a kid swimming back who I asked if he knew the one who was out there and if they would be joking to cry for help, and he was too busy panting and paddling back in to answer me himself. So, I just might have saved this kid’s life, and that can be thought-provoking.
The funny thing is I washed out of my lifeguard certification. I failed to do my twenty laps in ten minutes or whatever and couldn’t get passed as fit to guard, so I sat behind a desk taking money and handing out cookies and candy for three months. This was at a small-town, 9-foot-deep pool. Now I was in the Atlantic Ocean, essentially carrying the load of another person through a football field’s worth of water—and figuring out why they used those little red buoys on Baywatch.
I feel like I have a grip on life now, at least when it involves affecting other people’s—I’m still working on what I’m doing with my own. I’m also a writer, and enjoy what words bring to people’s experience, and how they can portray them in the first place. I’m writing a book, and it’s what I’ll be spending the extra time I have on if I don’t get this job anyway. So I know what I’m doing, and am not just throwing a half-effort into anything just for the sake of doing it. I enjoy the English language, and have a good idea how to show other people how to enjoy it themselves. Plus people themselves learn from teaching.
And who knows? Ten years down the road maybe one of these kids will think it’s something that this same big-shot author whose latest novel they just picked up was the one who taught them how to read in the first place.
NOTES
I got the job, by the way.