Calculus

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

My sixteen-year-old idea of what an intellectual looks like.

Philosopher Peter Singer wrote a 1972 essay called Famine, Affluence, and Morality that used to fill me with pure self-righteousness. In it, he contends that affluent people in western cultures should be donating all of our wealth, beyond what we need for necessities, to the global poor. He argues that, if we were walking by a pond and saw a child drowning, we wouldn’t hesitate to jump in to save the child because we were wearing nice clothes, or because there were other people around us who weren’t helping. But too often we look away from suffering because we don’t want to give up our nice things, or we’re distant from it, or we don’t perceive ourselves as the only person who can help. Proximity and uniqueness, Singer argues, are terrible metrics to judge our moral duty.

As a teenager living in poverty in rural Maine, it was a huge relief to read Singer’s essay. Finally, a grownup who made sense! Of course everyone who had more than enough to live comfortably should give the excess to those who were suffering! I was confident that I would do exactly that when my plans worked out, and scribbling in a garret in Paris during my twenties led to the fame and fortune I expected. (In my defense, the 80,000 Hours project movement wasn’t a thing yet, and so I didn’t have a practical metric for evaluating my career prospects.)

Fifteen years later, I hadn’t made it to Paris, and I wasn’t a famous author. Instead, I was teaching that Peter Singer essay to high school juniors in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, about an hour away, and a world apart, from where I went to high school. CEHS consistently ranks as one of the top high schools in Maine, both in terms of academic performance and funding. Almost every student who graduates attends college, and the student parking lot is full of late model luxury cars decorated with decals from the prestigious colleges students plan to attend. 

I was shocked by how uncomfortable, even angry, the essay made some of my students. A few kids argued that having to give away one’s wealth would disincentivize earning it in the first place. As I challenged my students to consider Singer’s argument, I remember feeling justified in having chosen to teach affluent AP students (rather than the poor, rural students I had intended to teach) because I could expose future doctors, lawyers, bankers, and business owners to Singer’s ideas. I tried not to notice that, if my own caring teachers had made the same choice, I would never have developed the skills to be accepted to a swanky private college and, thus, have my choice of teaching positions.

I believed that I had eschewed the pursuit of personal wealth to serve as a teacher, looking to my own frumpy wardrobe and modest house as evidence that I was a member of Singer’s altruistic army. Now I can see that I was doing exactly what Americans are programmed to: working to raise my own family’s standard of living. While part of me wanted to radicalize those privileged kids, another part wanted to join them. It was easy to get caught up in striving for more wealth for my own family, especially my daughter, in a community where everyone else seemed to have more than we did. Proximity, indeed.

It was a special kind of torture to raise Skye in a community full of kids who were wealthier than she was. Over and over again, she had to make sense of why her friends had finer clothes, better vacations, and bigger homes than we did. We tried to compensate for our modest incomes by being generous with our time: her dad coached her sports teams, I had summers off to take her to the beach every day, and we were both there to nurture her to the best of our abilities.

We found creative ways to punch above our financial weight class. For example, when Skye was in the seventh grade, I did a Fulbright teaching exchange to Scotland, and we made it our mission to visit as much of Europe as we could during school breaks, incurring quite a bit of debt in the process. When Skye returned to Cape Elizabeth the next year, one of her classmates was waxing poetic about her latest luxury vacation. She asked her friends, “Isn’t it just wonderful to ski in the Swiss Alps?” to which Skye replied, “I don’t know. Is it like skiing in the French Alps?” Her friend didn’t need to know that Skye had camped in a rented VW bus on a side street in Chamonix so that we could spend one precious day in those mountains.

After Skye graduated from high school a few years later, I moved to Silicon Valley to teach even more privileged kids at an even wealthier private school. My workload got smaller, and my pay went up significantly. My daughter was attending a swanky private college of her own, and I wanted to support her. Perhaps Peter Singer would have preferred that I join the Peace Corps and send my kid to public university, but those kinds of decisions are harder to make when your beloved child’s future hangs in the balance. 

Fast forward another fourteen years. I am no longer supporting a child, and I am no longer a teacher. Instead, I started a private ADHD coaching practice. My services aren’t covered by insurance, and, while I do offer a sliding scale, I don’t have any pro bono clients at the moment. I possess free time, skills, and disposable income. I could be devoting all of my time and much of my money to altruism. And, as my recent rereading of Singer’s essay reminds me, every dollar or day I spend on my own comfort or enrichment comes at the expense of someone who needs it more than I do.

Which brings me to my grandly titled “summer sabbatical.” Though I try not to fall into the trap of using my personal narrative to advertise my coaching business, it’s hard not to feel pressure to be an ADHD success story - someone who has learned to leverage her strengths, compensate for her (very real) challenges, and live a life of meaning and significance. So many of us crave that life; why would anyone seek support and guidance from a coach who has no success story to tell? I was hoping to return from my nine-week break having something concrete to show for it.

Alas, my summer had no central narrative, no hero’s journey. I went home to Maine for two of my nine weeks of vacation, and I went to Whidbey Island for another week to visit Damien’s mom. The rest of it was a meandering stream of friendly tennis matches, reading, household projects, cooking, journaling, beach walking, and daydreaming. I didn’t do a damn thing to save the world. In fact, rather than leveraging my strengths to help others, I felt powerfully drawn to practice skills at a novice or intermediate level.

I took tennis lessons and attended clinics. I studied introductory piano with a beautiful soul in my neighborhood, whose other students are all under the age of eighteen and who, when I “mastered” my first song (“When The Saints Come Marching In”) affixed a dog sticker to my photocopied sheet music.

I also continued to produce Letters from the Questhouse, which, honestly, has the same predictability and comfort as those other pursuits: my essay is due every two weeks. I can write whatever I want, and there is no length requirement, but there is the precedent that past essays have set, and each letter has (as I discovered when I reread them all this summer) a distinctive voice, structure, and cadence which is mine alone.

In other words, I led the semi-structured life of an upper middle class child on summer vacation, complete with family trips, household chores, lessons, and summer homework. It’s exactly what my soul was craving - guidance from caring teachers, opportunities to practice and grow, structure, and discipline, with lots of free time to play and dream. When Sheryl (my piano teacher) picked up her guitar to “jam” with me on the simple song I’d labored to learn, or when Jon (my tennis coach) invited me to mimic his ursine grace as he hit a slow motion backhand or overhead shot, I felt the frisson of the cared for child, and I wanted to weep with gratitude.

Now that I am the prosperous adult I dreamed of being when I was an impoverished child and a struggling young mom, I chose to devote some time and money this summer to rescuing myself from the pond. As a child, the calculus seemed simple: if you have more than you need, share it. As an adult, I have a more complicated definition of  “need,” one that travels all the way up Maslow’s hierarchy. I aspire to be a person my teenage self would have respected, and I also understand that a cracked cup will never runneth over. I am grateful beyond measure for my life.