Omens or Not
Omens or Not
Emily Sargent
If I believed in omens (or signs, or anything of that sort), I would have quit my part-time, online editing job the week after I started my full-time, grown-up office job that forced me to google “business casual.” The omen? My laptop’s keyboard stopped working.
But I have a pretty stubborn logical streak, and I was raised to be skeptical of anything along the lines of Gideon’s fleece. So, instead of quitting, I found a USB keyboard to plug into my laptop. I lugged my extra job around in two pieces that were loosely linked by a plastic cable. The contraption was just a hair too unwieldy to amuse me. It fit awkwardly into my backpack, the cheap keys rattling as I typed away late at night. Each time I balanced the keyboard on top of my laptop and plugged the two together, I wondered what it would take to make me decide to quit.
*
I hate making decisions. For as long as I can remember, I’ve prayed for God to just show me what to do. I moved to Boston from Vermont in April of 2017, a year after I had graduated college. By the time I was juggling two jobs and as many keyboards, I had lived in the Boston area for about 5 months, and I still wasn’t sure how I ended up there.
I could reference many journal pages from the year after college—filled with internal monologues and pro-con lists—that together created a shaky formula adding up to Boston. But I wouldn’t want to look too closely at that formula. When people ask, I give a CliffsNotes version of my move: I reference the potential of publishing jobs, the excitement of this particular city and its geographic location, my social connections, and a friend with space in her apartment. I talk quickly and then ask the next person why they moved to Boston before anyone can pry further.
Sometimes I’ll give the answer that I think is closest to the truth: “I just felt like it.”
I almost never make decisions based on a gut-level “feeling.” I journal, I pray, I seek advice, and I suck any friends within hearing distance into a vortex of verbal hemming and hawing. This is what I’ve always done. Somewhere in the midst of all that journaling (and just enough college psychology courses), I developed a nice distrust of my intuition. As a kid in a house with overflowing bookshelves, I quickly learned to analyze everything, debate my siblings, and, in my mom’s words, “Use the brain that God has given you.”
It was probably at some point in the process of college decisions, surrounded by pamphlets and pro-con lists, that I realized I may have taken her advice a bit too far. What’s a person to do if they can’t stop using their brain and take a step forward?
As the stakes of life continue to get higher, my bedrock of thought seems more fragile, less than equal to any particular situation. Instead of basing my decisions on logical proofs, I’ve become stuck in an endless mental jungle gym, afraid to jump at any single point in case that turns out to be The Wrong Decision. The whole process—repeated at every crossroad—is exhausting.
It’s enough to make me want to look for omens.
*
A few days after my keyboard found new life via the magic of USB cables, my apartment’s wi-fi cut out. I spent the next week or so chasing the internet from cafes to the library to the office next to my apartment. (As an aside, it turns out that many cafes don’t cater to the “post-11 p.m. remote worker” crowd.)
I should note, here, that this part-time job — editing advertising copy for small business websites and managing the writers — had become utterly and painfully boring to me. That had more to do with me than with the job itself. This job had taught me how to edit, and how to communicate passably well via email; my coworkers were friendly, and my hours were flexible. I didn’t exactly need the extra money, but I definitely didn’t not need it. All this job required of me was a working computer, some self-discipline, and access to the internet.
But two weeks after I started my new, full-time job in publishing, I sat in the Lincoln Public Library at 8 p.m. in front of a broken laptop, changing fragments and phrases about piping into complete sentences on home plumbing maintenance. I thought about omens.
*
The word “omen” always takes me back to Ancient Greece. The main thing I remember from my early exposure to The Odyssey is that the Greeks were seemingly very interested in bird entrails. My homeschool family read a kid’s edition of the epic when I was in second grade. This was the year we were getting ready to move from the Boston suburbs to Vermont. Odysseus and his friends, as far as I could tell, were pretty constantly burning animals and watching the smoke to see what the gods wanted them to do. They made life-changing decisions based on flocks of seagulls. I thought it was ridiculous, but I could recognize an effective system. The Greeks (at least those in the story) got things done.
The day we left our Boston house, a small-ish bird of prey settled on our roof for lunch. This was unusual enough to be cool, until we realized that the bird was devouring a small rodent. Our tearful goodbye to 20 Newland Road was punctuated by the sound of squirrel guts hitting the back deck.
We chuckled nervously, Odysseus in the back of our minds, and said it was a good thing we didn’t believe in omens. But now, looking back, I wonder what Odysseus would have made of the scene of squirrel guts. Would he have about-faced and stayed, taking this as a sign that the move to Vermont was ill-fated? Or, would he have fled to Vermont, interpreting the animal-carcass scenario as a sign that this house was now as dead to us as that squirrel?
That’s the thing about signs: they really work best in retrospect. When we look back and shape our own “epics,” we remember bird-of-prey moments and make them into our own personal symbols. I decided a while ago that omens, like logic, do little to help in the moment of decision.
Still, I often wonder what it would cost God to send a sign my way. I don’t expect an omen in the style of Odysseus. I know that most of us won’t ever get a burning bush, a soaked fleece, or an angelic encounter—but I don’t even think that’s what I’m after. I think, instead, of a passage from Isaiah 30. When Israel at last turns to God for help, Isaiah writes, God will be gracious and close to them: “Your teachers will be hidden no more; with your own eyes you will see them. Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it.’”
The simplicity of that final phrase almost takes my breath away. It’s a clear directive that would strip away the chaos of journals, pro-con lists, and the so-often contradictory advice of friends. It promises rest.
*
In the end, even the demise of my laptop’s power cord wasn’t enough of a sign for me. I bought a new one off Amazon, and kept miserably thinking about new ways to write about HVAC maintenance for small business websites.
Once my computer problems had stabilized, I worked my two jobs for another two weeks. At some point in the month of October, I took a good look at exactly how much I hated doing this job, made sure there were no logical bright-red flags, and called my manager to give my notice. Just like that.
I can’t tell you exactly what convinced me to quit my editing job. I also can’t tell you what exactly convinced me to move to Boston. But as I look back, I can watch a few moments crystallize into something that, looking back, might resemble a sign.
For instance, I can point to one rainy night in January of 2017, when I was visiting the Boston friend I eventually moved in with. We rode the T into Boston’s North End, got drenched as we ran around looking for Italian food, and managed to lose ourselves in the winding streets of old Boston on our way to coffee.
I remember stepping out of a side street and being hit by a wave of home. In the middle of the rainy night stood my old church, the centuries-old steeple as familiar as the old back porch that the raptor had used as a trash bin. The lights were on in what I remembered was the youth room, and I felt a sort of tug in my stomach. Nothing, really—just a sense, somewhere between nostalgia and hope, that it was time to come back. I took a mental snapshot of the image and filed it away. A month later, I decided to move to Boston.
The mental snapshot for quitting my job doesn’t work as neatly, in part because it took place three days after I decided to quit. I had already given my notice, and was now just finishing things up and waiting to hear back from my managers about my official last day. That Wednesday night, I left work (the new work, at my grown-up office job) and dragged my taped-together laptop to a coffee shop.
I powered up my computer and tried to connect to the internet. When nothing came up, I asked the barista. No, she told me, they didn’t offer wifi. Naturally, I thought. I used my phone’s limited data to make a hot spot, tried to log-on to my work email, and received a message saying that my account no longer existed. I stared at the words for a moment, making sure they really said what I thought they did, and then that they meant what I thought they did. I turned off my two-piece, dying computer. Peace stole around me like steam from a fresh latte, and as I breathed it in, I thought I could feel the new shape of my life become solid under my feet.
I wasn’t quite sure how I had got there. I still don’t know what combination of thought and intuition to follow at the next crossroads I find. And, no—I still don’t believe in omens.
But I remember that as the blue light of my laptop flickered and went black, I looked outside to see the warm yellow glow of the street lamps lining Boston Common. They marched back into the distance, tall and bright, like signposts in the dark.
Emily Sargent
Writer & Editor
Emily lives and writes just outside of Boston, MA; she also calls Vermont home. In her spare time, she works as an editor in medical research publishing.
Photography by Aron Yigin