During the autumn after I graduated from college, I took a Spanish class at the local community college, as much to improve my Spanish as to defer my student loans. For my final essay, I wrote about how I was about to move to the Czech Republic to teach English. I was spending most of my free time in those days making plans and arrangements for the move, emailing embassies only to learn the extent of the red tape we would have to wade through, trying to find jobs for my girlfriend and I in the same town, researching airfares, and so on. The plan to move to Europe to teach English seemed like an unreachable golden glow ever beyond the horizon, so when it came time to write this final essay for Spanish class, I wrote about the Czech Republic as la tierra de la leche y de la miel (the land of milk and honey), a thinly veiled reference to Exodus 3:8:

And I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land unto a good and spacious land, unto a land flowing with milk and honey: unto the place of the Canaanites, and the Hittites, and the Amorites, and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites.

(Many such passages in the Old Testament seem to chronicle the Israelites’ well-established propensity to take land that doesn’t belong to them, but this is not the place to delve into that. My only comment on the matter is that sometimes it is best not to trust everything God tells you when you’re dying of hunger in the desert. Remember how Jesus got all confused from hunger in the desert? And he was way smarter than you.)

There is very little in the Czech Republic that makes one think of milk or honey. It is true that both are available there, but neither “milk-like” nor “honey-like” really does justice to the character of the Czech nation. Be that as it may, I could not help but interpret our Czech destination as the reward that lay at the far end of much sweat and toil. In fact, right before I left I was telling Pharoah to let my people go.

Fast forward about a year, and picture me at the front of a classroom assigning an end-of-year essay to a class of in-service teachers who are attending classes one day a week working toward a master’s degree. All dairy- and hymenoptera-related images have fled my mind months ago, and I am just looking forward to the end of my stint as a teacher of English as a foreign language. In fact, I may at the moment in question be wondering why I would assign another essay to all my classes when reading the 250 essays from the previous semester had been such a disaster. Then again, I may not be wondering that. It depends on when you let go of the fast-forward button.

One of the students in that class was Tomaš P., whose essay made me laugh quite a bit. Out loud, if I remember right. It was about what he hoped to be doing ten years hence, and what he could be doing now to ensure that it happened. In ten years, he related, he hoped to be married to the girl with whom he would be spending the upcoming summer in his own land of milk and honey. In this case, though, that land was more commonly known as Wildwood, New Jersey. He went on at length about how wonderful it would be, about how in his 30s it was difficult to remember how to be dashing after having outgrown the need to feel dashing so long before, but how essential it was that he remember, and quickly.

Tomaš visited me last night at home, accompanied by Eva, his woman of milk and honey. (That metaphor makes so much more sense in reference to a woman than to land—though now that I think about it, perhaps the land-of-milk-and-honey thing is actually a double-action recursive slingshot metaphor, in which the milk and honey refer to Israel, which in turn stands for woman. This, of course, would go a long way toward explaining why it is that so many men are willing to fight and kill over it, and why whoever is in possession of it guards it so jealously. It would be unfair just to blame the men, though. If Israel didn’t go all weak in the knees every time some two-bit prophet wandered past in sandals and loincloth, the world would be a much safer place today. I’ll stop there, but if you end up writing your PhD thesis about this idea, throw me a bone in the footnotes, okay?)

When they arrived at my house, Tomaš and Eva had just finished their summer adventure on the Jersey shore, and they seemed mildly disillusioned. Eva’s English lagged behind that of Tomaš, and she had been stuck scooping ice cream eight hours a day for the past three months. Tomaš had scored a slightly better retail job on the boardwalk, though that was offset by the eleven hour days, he said. But they had saved a lot of money, which was the point, and were on their way to spend a month hiking around Costa Rica. They visited my house because I had told Tomaš months before that they could store some things here when they left. Their flight was out of a local airport, so it was actually convenient for all involved. They even gave me an inflatable dolphin as a thank-you present.

When we talked about their return to retrieve their stuff from me in mid-October, I suddenly remembered that Tomaš, in his real life very far from here, is a middle-school teacher. So I asked him, “Um . . . Tomaš, don’t you have to teach at the end of this month?” And his smile broadened into an enormous grin: “No, I quit my job when we left Brno. After we go to Costa Rica, Eva and I will trying to move to Australia, where we will find new jobs and study English. If that is not possible, we will move to New Zealand, where we do not need visa, but is more hard to find a job. But what is a job?” And then he paused for a moment and looked down. “Maybe you remember an essay I wrote for your class. . . .”

His grin lingered on his cheeks for a moment longer than he meant to allow, but he quickly brought it under control. In that moment, though, it was obvious that his essay had not been just a clever way to satisfy an assignment. With the promise of Eva, Tomaš’s whole world flows with milk and honey. Jobs and geography are disposable. The world is nothing but yet-untapped potential spiralling upward and outward, and if in the process of following that potential one occasionally has to quit a job, or move to a foreign country, or abandon everything he thought he knew about his safe and predictable future, well, it’s a very small price to pay in the end.