A friend and former colleague e-mailed me yesterday to ask about my life. We had worked closely for some years, and were good friends. Like many men, we lost touch with our friendship and with one another, we were too busy.

We talked on the phone for awhile to catch up.

He had taken a tenured job at a Midwestern Journal School a few years before schools stopped giving out tenure and hired mostly adjunct professors – part-timers who lived in slavery.

He has that rarest of American things: lifetime job security. “I could murder my dean,” he said, “and they couldn’t fire me.”

My friend was secure, he had a wonderful plan, a good pension, summers off and a light but interesting case load. He had a summer home in Maine.

In the next year, he would have seven months off to write one of those books academics are expected to write. Nobody could tell him to do anything he didn’t wish to do. I detected a whiff or arrogance I had now seen before.

I am a former academic, I taught in a big city school, I have no illusions that academic teaching is a perfect life. But I did feel a momentary flash envy at all of the security my friend had in his job – regular paychecks, no health coverage worries, and when the time came for him to retire, he was all set and could afford to live almost anywhere he wished.

That is not, I told him, the writer’s life, it is not the artist’s life.

His hard work paid off for him, he said. I expect no payoff for my hard work, which is good, because there won’t be any.

As we talked, he asked me about my security, and I told him the truth. No pension, no savings, really, no top-tier health plan, I had a big hole in the donut every year. I have no paid vacation of any kind, a steady, daily work load, I could not afford summers off.

The only chance I ever  had of retiring – I have no wish to retire –  and hope to die right here on the farm, or at least close by.

I could, I said, die in poverty.

But my life, I said is wonderful. I love my wife, my blog, my farm, my photography, the small acts of kindness I am learning to do, the friends I am beginning to make. For me, this is the golden age of my life, the apogee, the summit.

“Doesn’t this lack of security bother you?,” he asked me. “I couldn’t live like that. How do you?” He didn’t mean to be offensive or doubting, he was sincerely puzzled that I had chosen that kind of life. But we had clearly lost touch with one another.

“First off,” I said, “nobody forced me into this life.  I chose it. I am responsible for it. It is the life I have always wanted, and I am happier in this life than I have ever been.”

But, he asked again, does the lack of security frighten you?

No, I said, it doesn’t frighten me, except on the darkest nights where I sometimes feel a wave of guilt and sorrow thinking I could not possibly leave Maria enough  money to live her life and do her work in comfort.

When the sun rises, I understand this is both a sexist and patronizing dream, and I also know Maria is as well equipped to care for herself as anyone I have ever known.  She has no interest in being taken care of by me all of her life.

It’s not all about money, not even in America.

But still, I can’t wave away who I was and who I am. But this fear is short lived, and I don’t it through the day or most of the night.

“Every morning, when I wake up,” I told my friend, “I tell myself I am OK today.” And that is as far as I take it.

And that is the truth.

I am OK today. I have everything I need. I have everything I have ever wanted. My life is full of meaning and love and purpose. I am surprised to find myself an instrument of good, an enabler of small acts of great kindness. I fully embrace this role.

I haven no idea about tomorrow, or a thousand tomorrows. I am OK today.

I am an artist of a kind now, and the artist is meant to put the objects of the world together in such a way that through them you will experience that light, that radiance, which Joseph Campbell writes is “the light of our consciousness in which all things both hide and, when properly looked upon, are revealed.”

The hero journey is one of the patterns through which that radiance shines the brightest, and I have been on that journey for much of my adult life. A good life, I believe, is one hero journey after another.

My friend knew all about the hero journey, he said he declined the trip. He wanted something more solid for himself and family.

So there it is, I said. Different paths.

Over and over again, I am called to the realm of adventure, to new horizons, to new challenges and trials.

Every morning, each time, there are the same questions. Do I dare? Can I survive? And if I do dare, all of the dangers and traps and pitfalls are also there.

There is, I told my bewildered friend (I think he was so grateful not to be me) there is always the possibility of a fiasco.

But then, there is also the possibility of bliss.

He said he had to go, we said goodbye. Somehow, I think it was our last conversation.