Grant reflects on the stretch of life when his career, finances, and personal world all collided—and how an unexpected inner shift changed everything.

After returning from Arizona, Grant spends a year substitute teaching because he can’t find steady work. If he’s going to stay in education, he knows he needs more income. He and his father find a piece of property off Nebraska Avenue (between Linebaugh and Busch) and decide to build a 10-unit apartment building. Grant jokes that he even “got [his dad] out of retirement” to do it.

The project is chaotic. Grant is dealing with a hernia problem while the building goes up. His father hires workers from a local bar, and Grant remembers that sometimes they literally had to sober up the crew to get the job finished. At the same time, his then-wife is divorcing him. Grant says he was emotionally overwhelmed and struggling to handle everything at once.

In that low point, he finds transcendental meditation. He saves money, attends the introductory presentation, and begins learning to slow down and control his breathing. What starts as a coping tool becomes a turning point. Grant describes discovering “inner resources” to get through anything. He learns to stop placing so much doubt in himself, to stop assuming he’s always right, and to forgive himself and others. Most of all, he says it opened him to love—changing how he experiences life. His spirituality expands beyond religion into something deeper and more personal.

That internal transformation changes his teaching too. Grant contrasts the first half of his career—when everything felt like a fight with students, parents, and administration—with the second half, when he learned to modify his own behavior to increase learning in the classroom. When things got noisy, he would pause and take a slow, deep breath so students could feel the shift. He stopped blaming kids. He started seeing them differently, sometimes even telling them how “physically and emotionally” beautiful they were—recognizing their humanity instead of treating the classroom like a battleground.

With time, Grant begins to understand the scale of a teaching career. Over 35 years, with roughly 30 students per class and new groups each semester, he estimates he may have impacted 30,000 to 50,000 students. The feedback he receives over the years—students from every walk of life, in every kind of job, even people who credit him with helping them finish school—becomes proof that his work mattered, even if his salary never reflected it.

This chapter is about transformation: pressure, breakdown, breath, perspective—and how a teacher learns that meaning isn’t measured by a paycheck, but by the lives you touch.