A Vignette on Staying Anyway
Before Dawn (1995)
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The doughnut shop opened at five. I arrived at four-thirty to start the coffee, to arrange the trays, to tie on the apron that smelled of yeast and sugar and the particular exhaustion of people who work before the sun rises. I was twenty-five years old. I had three children at home. I had textbooks in my bag.
Between customers, I would pull out whatever I was reading that week. Introduction to Political Science. Organizational Behaviour. The pages grew soft from handling, spotted with fingerprints I could not always wash away before my shift ended and my afternoon class began. I did not know then that I was living a paradox: surrounded by people all morning, profoundly alone in what I was trying to become. No one in my family had gone to university. No one I worked with understood why I would spend money we did not have on books I read standing up behind a counter at five in the morning.
I think now about what I was learning in those hours before dawn. Not the content of the textbooks, though that mattered. I was learning how to be with myself in the middle of chaos. I was learning that solitude is not the same as being alone. You can be surrounded by people and still be utterly isolated in your purpose. You can be physically alone and feel accompanied by something larger than yourself. The space between five and nine, between the first customer and the last page I could read before class, became a kind of practice. I did not have language for it then. I do now. I call it alonetude: the contemplative, chosen engagement with solitude that allows you to be genuinely present to yourself rather than merely by yourself.
The Long Middle
Years passed. I completed my degrees. I built a career contract teaching at Thompson Rivers University, standing in front of classrooms instead of behind counters, talking about leadership, ethics, and organizational behaviour to students who reminded me of myself. Some of them worked night shifts before my morning classes. Some of them calculated whether they could afford both tuition and groceries. I saw them, because I had been them.
But the uncertainty never fully lifted. For seventeen years, I have worked as a contract faculty member. Each semester brings the question of whether I will be offered work. Each contract is temporary. I have applied for permanent positions more times than I can count and watched others receive what I was told I had not quite earned. The institution depends on my flexibility, my expertise, and my willingness to show up semester after semester without guarantees. I have learned to live in the space between being essential and being disposable. I have learned that staying anyway is its own form of practice.
When people ask about my research on precarity and belonging in higher education, I sometimes want to say, “I am not studying this from a distance.” I am living it. The international students I research, the contract faculty I represent, and my children, who need me to show up every single day, regardless of what next semester holds. We are all navigating institutions that claim to welcome us while refusing to secure our place within them.
Thirty Days on the Sea of Cortez
Today, I stood on a malecón in Loreto, Mexico, watching pelicans dive into the Sea of Cortez. I was three thousand kilometres from home, alone in a way I had not been since those early mornings behind the doughnut counter. Thirty days stretched before me. No students to teach. No meetings to attend. No one needed me to hold their world together. Just myself and the question of what I would find there.
What I found was not emptiness. It was present. I began to understand that all those years of navigating precarity, of staying anyway when institutions offered no guarantees, had taught me something I could not have learned any other way. They had taught me how to be with uncertainty. They had taught me that safety is not the absence of risk but the felt sense that you can meet whatever comes. They had taught me that meaning is not waiting at the end of the road but woven into the walking itself.
I came to Loreto with a word: alonetude. This is a word I coined to describe the in-between place of loneliness and solitude. It names the experience of being genuinely present to yourself in solitude, of choosing to be alone in a way that restores rather than depletes. It requires four things: intentional choice, felt safety, present-moment awareness, and meaning integration. All four must be present. You cannot think your way into alonetude if your nervous system is screaming danger. You cannot force meaning onto empty time. But when the conditions align, something opens. You remember that you have always been enough, even when the world told you otherwise.
Staying Anyway
I do not know what next semester holds. I do not know if the applications I have submitted will lead to interviews, to offers, to the security I have worked toward for decades. What I know is that I have learned to stay anyway. I have learned that the space between five and nine, between uncertainty and meaning, between isolation and alonetude, is where the real work happens. It is where we become the people we are trying to be, not despite the precarity but through it.
The doughnut shop is long gone. But I still wake before dawn sometimes, still reach for whatever I am reading, still feel that particular presence that comes from being alone with your own becoming. Some things you carry with you. Some practices do not require a meditation cushion or a month in Mexico. They need only the willingness to stay, to pay attention, to believe that the doors education opens are worth the cost of walking through them.
I am still walking. I am still staying anyway.
The Practice of Alonetude
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