The Work I Catch Myself Thinking About on My Days Off

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There is a particular kind of luck that does not look like luck. It looks like catching yourself, on a day off, thinking about your job, and feeling glad instead of trapped.

I work as a medical equipment advanced technician for the Canadian Red Cross here on Vancouver Island. In plain terms, I help make sure the wheelchairs, the walkers, the hospital beds, the equipment people need to live with dignity actually reach the hands that need them, in good working order, when they need it. It is not glamorous and it does not trend. A walker does not photograph like a stage. But somebody gets to stay in their own home a little longer because of it, somebody recovers with a little more comfort, somebody's mother keeps her independence one more season. That is the whole job, and I find it hard to imagine work that matters more.

The thing I did not expect is how it follows me home. I will be off for the weekend and find my mind drifting to it anyway, a better way to organize a delivery, a person we helped, a problem worth solving on Monday. For a long time I thought that meant I did not know how to switch off. I have come to understand it differently. You do not catch yourself thinking about something you resent. The mind returns, uninvited, to the things it loves. The fact that my work shows up in my off hours is not a failure to rest. It is the clearest evidence I have that I landed somewhere right.

When the work is not for the money

Most of us were taught that a job is a transaction, you trade hours you would rather have back for money you need, and the goal is to need less of the trade over time. I understand that math, I have lived inside it, and for a long time it was the only math available to me. But there is a different feeling waiting on the other side of it that almost nobody describes, because we are not really raised to expect it. It is the feeling of doing something you would want to be doing even if the arithmetic were different. Where the paycheque is real and welcome, but it is not the reason you came, the way a single paycheque was never the whole point of how I have tried to build my life. You came because the work itself gives something back that money cannot.

That feeling changes you. You stop watching the clock. You start noticing the person on the other end of the task. You bring your whole attention instead of the rented portion of it. And on your days off, the work quietly visits, not as a burden, but the way a good friend crosses your mind.

Tying it to everything else

I have a habit I cannot seem to break, which is connecting my work to the rest of what I build. The Red Cross has become the thread I keep pulling through.

Twice now I have produced ballet in Mexico, where I trained, and given the proceeds away to a cause instead of keeping them. A production of The Nutcracker in 2022, and La Fille Mal Gardée in 2024, together raised around seventy thousand pesos for the Mexican Red Cross. I got nothing from either one except the thing I was actually after, which was the knowing. The knowing that the same hands that organize medical equipment on an island in Canada also helped put a little more care into the world a few thousand kilometres south. And at the end of this year I am going back to Mexico to produce another Nutcracker, and we will do it a third time, for the same reason, which is no reason at all except that I want to.

I am not telling you this to be admired for it. I am telling you because the through-line is the whole point of a life that feels like it holds together: the art, the work, the small businesses, the giving, all of it pointed, eventually, at the same human place.

If any of this lands

The Red Cross is not a closed club. It runs on ordinary people who decided to give some of their time to their neighbours, and it is almost always looking for more of them. If reading this stirred even a small I could do that, you probably could. You can find your local Red Cross and the ways to volunteer, in Canada or in your own country, and the range of what they need is wider than most people assume.

You do not have to produce a ballet or fix a hospital bed. You just have to find the version of useful that you would happily think about on a day off, and then go do it on purpose. That, more than any income I write about, is the part of my life I would actually wish on you.