When Right Livelihood Cleared Its Throat

How a small internal nudge changed the direction of my work and my days.

Hello again. It turns out I didn’t forget Substack… it just had to wait its turn.
The school year kicked into full gear, and my bandwidth was quickly claimed by lesson plans, hallway conversations, and the beautiful chaos that comes with teaching. On top of that, I committed to a 21-day Interfaith pod challenge through ServiceSpace that invited me into deeper reflection than I expected.

So I’ve been learning, listening, and trying to keep up.
And now I’m ready to write again.

Spaces like ServiceSpace feel rare to me. A place where you can actually talk about compassion without anyone rolling their eyes, where people show up because they want to think deeply about how to live. I’m grateful for that. It’s become a little outlet where I can slow down enough to notice what’s moving in me.

Being there brought me back to the first time I started wondering whether my inner life and outer life were still lined up. It wasn’t dramatic. No lightning bolt. Just a quiet feeling that something was out of tune. And because that’s how I’m wired, I went looking. Not for a new religion, but for some kind of guide.

The first place I landed was Buddhism.

What caught me right away was the Noble Eightfold Path. Eight simple categories. No guilt spiral. No “go sit in the box and confess your entire personality.” Just a gentle: How’s this part of your life going? And this one? It felt more like a mid-season check-in than anything else.

Right view.
Right intention.
Right livelihood.

That last one kind of stopped, looked at me, and cleared its throat.

It wasn’t accusing me of anything. It just helped me see the tiny gap between the work I was doing in aerospace and the person I hoped I was becoming. Buddhism gave me language for that without piling on shame. Karma, in that sense, wasn’t about reward or punishment, it was more like noticing the pattern you’re reinforcing every day.

Still, ideas only take you so far. What really shifted things for me was the simple act of witnessing and being witnessed. Something I didn’t have words for until the pod.

There’s something powerful about being seen by people who aren’t trying to fix you or steer you. It made room for honesty. It softened the part of me that feels overly responsible for everything. And it reminded me of the kind of presence I want to offer to my students and to my community.

That’s also when right livelihood started clearing its throat a little louder.

I took a group of my students on a field trip to the aerospace company where I used to work. Seeing a military drone program through their eyes hit me in a way it never had before. It wasn’t an abstract ethical question anymore, it was a real one. I couldn’t keep pouring my energy into building something I didn’t feel good handing to the next generation.

Leaving engineering wasn’t about rejecting a career. It was about stepping toward alignment. Teaching felt like moving in the direction my life had been trying to point me for a while. More available. Less armored. More connected to actual human beings rather than systems and metrics.

Now the question I keep turning over is how to bring some of that spirit back home to Pontiac, to the kids I work with, to the baseball field. How do I practice the kind of witnessing I experienced in the pod? How do I show up with compassion in a place where not everyone has been met with it? How do I let my work reflect the person I’m trying to become.

If karma is the residue of our choices, then maybe each small act of alignment, each way we choose presence over performance, clears the sky a little for whoever comes after us.

I’m grateful for a space where conversations like this can happen. My highlight has been recognizing that simple, human power of witnessing and being witnessed. And what I’m still thinking about is how to keep that alive, how to carry right livelihood with me in a way that’s real, steady, and lived.