My mother called the other day to announce she was retiring. This is news of note only to her family and a few friends but it may serve as a source of inspiration to some others.

In a few months my mother will begin her ninth decade. She has spent a good part of the last twenty years in the employ of one of the nation's most chic department stores. Although I have no idea how many hundreds of thousands of dollars she has garnered for her employers, I do know that she will be sorely missed. But eighty seemed a good age to give it a rest and so she is turning in her name tag, giving up her employee discount and planning new ways to fill her days.

The last time she made this big of a change came when, after teaching in an elementary school for nearly twenty years, she came home one day and announced that she was done doing that. The pedantic passion was dying, she reasoned, and before it died altogether, it was time to get out. So she began selling high fashion dresses to fashionably dressed ladies.

It was a brave decision in some ways, not least because of the stigma attached to her leaving the noble and important field of education for something that, if not ignoble, certainly wasn't all that important. But I respected her decision then and even more so now.

She knew when to quit.

Recently, my wife (who teaches first grade) and I were trying to enjoy the breakfast half of a vacation B&B while a woman at another table was announcing to anyone within her shouting distance that she was dreading the imminent return to her classroom of "brats" as she derisively referred to them. The more she talked, the more convinced we were that the very last place this teacher should be headed was to the classroom. We cringed at the thought of the impressionable minds she was bound to warp by her hatred of her profession.

Grateful that we both still loved doing what we do, we nevertheless wondered what signs we should look for as warning that the end was nigh.

It begins and ends with joy, we decided. This is not to say that every day is bound to be happy and light. We both are too old to pretend to such nonsense. Rather, we saw as a requirement an abiding sense of purpose and meaning to our work, a deep pleasure that comes when we know that what we do matters to others and to ourselves. When that sense begins to vanish, so must we.

Somewhere I read that the average American now has four different careers between beginning and ending a working life. This is a very dramatic change from just a generation ago. It could be a wonderful statistic if it means that more and more of us are discovering the importance of finding what we want to do and doing it.

I am haunted by the sadness of that scene in the B&B. It seems a crime of great proportion for the woman to continue as a teacher. Surely she has a moral obligation to tender her resignation before any more damage can be done...both to her students and to her. It is a pathetic scenario that will eventually have her hating herself as much as her job.

I am deeply grateful that I continue to enjoy the work I do. Each day brings a continuing awareness of the importance of vocational pleasure. Wasting even a day in personally unrewarding work is a tragedy that serves as a powerful witness of what can happen when you don't know when to quit.

It is one of many lessons I learned from my Mom.