The light in Greece is fabled to have a singular clarity which makes it the perfect place for painters. There are other places on Earth which are good for painters, but as far as light goes, Greece has no equal. It's light to see by; light to think by. I have never been to Greece, but I know of another kind of light which, although belonging to a narrowly described set of conditions, is easily available to ordinary people. I'm talking about the light in the parking lot, midway through a weekday morning, after you have just quit your job.

Traffic is quieter at eleven than it was at eight-thirty. Your spine unfurls. The child dawdling on the grass, the college student winging past on his bicycle, and the old man on the park bench are suddenly your compatriots, fellow rulers of the day. With the sun overhead the air has a richness; the afternoon extends like a gold-paved pier into the future. You have time, time for a hot bath and a cold drink, time for hobbies, time at last for love.

It does not take long for a job to get under your skin. The process begins the first time you tell someone how you make a living. If you're surprised by a warm blast of pride at the telling, you are truly blessed. More likely, your job will come to define you in ways you never considered when blearily filling out the nineteenth application form.

There may come a Friday when you are having a drink, bled dry from the week, and you glance down the bar and catch sight of that most horrifying apparition: You, in Fifty Years. It takes a moment for you to realize it's a real person, a worn penny who once shone as brightly as you do now. Blank expression, hands shriveled by carpal tunnel syndrome, lips noiselessly reciting the inane exchanges of half a century in the business. Call him an omen, call him a sucker, but buy him a drink and get out of there.

Inevitably, in weeks or months, will come the Dreams. Maybe people in exciting fields find illuminative release in dreams about work, but a work dream usually means one thing only: it's time to switch jobs again. Employment is like an oil spill; if you keep moving, it won't weigh you down.

If you hang on, you'll eventually receive one of those Mystical Warnings: engaged in some menial task, you are suddenly able to view yourself from above, shuffling along a hallway with an armload of files, and if you are a certain kind of person you may think: WAIT A MINUTE! I ONLY HAVE ONE LIFE HERE!

Before I go into my personal experiences I want to make clear that quitting, especially repeated quitting, isn't for everyone. This piece isn't about the shame of joblessness or the inconveniences of bumming, but for a lot of people, quitting is a luxury they can't afford.

Single, childless, and otherwise unfettered workers have the most choices, in this as in everything else. Because of the health care situation in this country, leaving a job is primarily a privilege of the healthy, even if the job is what's making you sick in the first place. And the age-induced pull toward stability and security disallows feckless quitting, although I've known plenty of exceptions.

But when you have people who count on you and your income, you just can't quit. When you have bills which, if not paid, will reduce your lifestyle beyond your ability to cope, you can't quit. If you are fulfilled by your job, you won't quit.

Otherwise, it's one of the all-time, deep-breath, hands-down best ways to spend a day.

Waitress, age sixteen. The first hour of my first shift, I arranged bread baskets and set tables. My boss, a three-hundred-pound wealthy Greek woman who, I've learned since, sponsors a float in the Mardi Gras parades each year so that she can dress up as Persephone and throw beads, eased like an ocean liner out of the kitchen and docked behind the bar. Her little eyes flitted around the empty restaurant, disapproval already creasing her mighty countenance. On my way by, she said, "Hey, skinny-minnie. Anyone on the potato farm ever teach you to set a table? Forks go on the right, sweetheart." She disappeared into the steam and clatter of the kitchen.

Incredulous more than hurt, but assured that I'd already had my fill of the fine dining scene, I hung my apron in the employees' bathroom and slipped out by the back stairs. On the way down I nabbed two bottles of wine. My friends met me down the road at the beach, and we swam with our cigarette packs in our teeth to a raft, where we drank the wine. The phosphorescence was glorious that night.

My friend began working at that restaurant shortly after my one-hour stint, and she kept working there for five years. She learned to shrug off the bad vibes and think of the tips she was earning. I respect that approach, but I have never been able to pull it off. No matter the money or the perks, I'm too self-assured, perhaps too arrogant, to believe in my bones that the job matters more than my happiness.

Even when I'm working in a field that I think necessary and honorable, I am always surprised by the extent to which my fellow employees must for survival's sake submerge themselves in the trivial sludge, especially the mood swings of management. Daunting edicts filter down from the uppermost tier, the brainstorming of faceless puppeteers endlessly tweaking the minute details in an effort to squeeze the life out of employees at minimum cost to the company. The obsessive generation of needless paperwork within the human services industry, for example, is enough to drive out any sane, goodhearted social worker. That so many remain is more of a testament to their saintliness than an affirmation of the system within which they operate.

Underlying a tendency to quit jobs is an innate restlessness, and priorities which seem at odds with those of other people. But as I recall the many jobs that I have left suddenly, there is always some precipitating event, however slight. And must it be catastrophic? For most of us, the coals of discontent are always smoldering. You know what's going to happen once the wind picks up. Why wait until you're on fire?

Something below a chambermaid, age 18. I was hitchhiking to a hotel on the harbor every evening, where I worked alone in a warm, feculant, poorly-lit basement loading towels into giant washing machines and watching for rats. The pay was abyssmal. There was a night watchman who came by every night, real late, and offered to cut my hair. One afternoon, preparing to leave for work, I slammed my finger in the screen door. It hurt only for a minute, but in that minute I decided that returning to the hotel was out of the question.

Leaving a dead-end job after only two weeks seemed like an obvious thing to do. I had mastered a few of the underground mechanics of yet another business, and new opportunities beckoned, sort of.

Friends and family, however, responded to the news with consternation. There had been no argument with a co-worker, no damning behavior on the part of my supervisor. People seemed disturbed not because I had quit again, but because I had quit without feeling bad.

Cute tantrum scenes in movies notwithstanding, the best, most liberating kind of quitting is sparked by something other than confrontation. It's the difference between jumping and being pushed; if you're jostled off the balcony, you're looking over your shoulder in order to blame somebody. Jumping, you face forward and taste the wind.

But know this: other people just won't get it. You'll be told that you lack some essential trait which enables people to succeed. This is called responsibility, or commitment, or if the speaker is a real cretin, stick-to-itiveness. But come on. The hotel basement smells like rodents; you've been told to take a piss test before starting a job where you can't piss except at breaktime; you're worrying that your boss is going to follow you into the walk-in freezer and pull the door closed behind him. These are not situations deserving of your patience or your fortitude.

Upscale clothing shopgirl, age 20. I scurried up the sidewalk, three minutes late. From half a block away I could see the craven fear on the faces of my two middle-aged co-workers as they beckoned frantically for me to open up; despite being much younger and vastly lacking in experience, I was the only employee who had been given a key. The boss was a vile little terrier of a woman, who wouldn't let us sit down on the job or listen to anything besides Paul Simon.

"Thank God you made it! I can hear the phone ringing inside!" shouted Betsy.

"It's Eva checking up on us. Let us in!" cried Susan.

I came within ten feet of them, tossed the sad bitches my keys, and turned back home on my kitten heels.

Ever play "Empathy" in a chain supermarket, at a toll booth, or in the bowels of a parking garage? Ever imagine yourself working those jobs, day after day? Do you sometimes look at, say, the plastic wrapping on a magazine, and think: A human being made this somewhere?

At a Wal-mart (doesn't much matter which one, does it?) I watched an oldish employee in the crafts section measuring and cutting yards of fabric. Her work station was lit by fluorescent panels which emitted a faint but high-pitched buzzing sound. Over several loudspeakers ran a continuous barrage of Wal-mart slogans. There were four television screens that I could see without turning my head, flashing fast-paced advertisements for various products.

"Does that buzzing sound drive you nuts?" I asked her.

"I sort of stopped hearing it after a while," she said, and smiled wryly. "Thanks for reminding me."

Don't bother telling your loved ones about the garden of possibility which bursts into flower as soon as you've punched out for the last time, or the high that comes over you as you peel out of the parking lot. There's that other word they'll fling at you.

Insane nothing. Life is brief, and if you feel that truth pounding in your blood and your muscles while hoisting boxes in some warehouse, the only really crazy thing is to keep going with the boxes. Take a week off and start looking for another job. This only sounds glib. If you think you can't afford to quit, look around your home for something to sell. Your soul ought to be the last thing you put on the market.

All right: that old lady with the scissors might not want to quit; she might not be able to quit. But she's not getting into heaven because she stuck it out in Wal-mart, and nobody's waiting at the finish line with a gold medal for longest service at the crappiest job. They don't even give out gold watches anymore.

Some wise words from wise men on the matter:

"Hold every minute sacred." That's Thomas Mann.

"Work is the scythe of time." Napoleon.

"I am myself and what is around me, and if I do not save it, it shall not save me." Jose Ortega y Gasset.

Or here's one you've heard a few times, sitting home in the middle of the day: "Like sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives."