Mark Mooney went to a lot of effort and expense to get a new job that pays half as much as his old job. And he couldn’t be happier.

Mark, 49, says he was making good money as a software salesman, “but I hated my life.”

He decided he should do something -- had to do something -- more in line with his Buddhist beliefs. So, with his wife Christina’s blessing, he went back to school at the University of Michigan-Flint a few years ago and earned a bachelor’s degree in nursing.

Now he’s a full-time hospice nurse at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital. He loves his job so much that after a recent vacation he realized he couldn’t wait to get back to work and see his patients and coworkers.

“I can’t see doing anything else with my life,” he says, smiling. “This is what I live for, to know that I helped someone die with dignity and peace, and that I helped their family through it.”

Mark had a long-standing respect for nurses. He broke his neck and was temporarily paralyzed in a trampoline accident in his youth, and remembers admiring his care-givers and telling his mother, “I think I might like to do that some day.”

In 1998, Mark’s father used hospice when dying of complications related to Alzheimer’s. Again, Mark thought, “You know, I might want to do that.”

It took him a while to get there, though.

When he finished his high school career in Dearborn -- he calls it “Deadborn” -- he decided college wasn’t for him. Neither was full-time partying, as it turned out, so Mark ended up in Ann Arbor rooming with his brother, who attended U-M.

He landed a job as a cashier at a local bakery, and that led to a job as a baker. He was trained to be a pastry chef in the “classic European style” by Ian Titterton, an Englishman who at that time owned Ian’s Patisserie on Main Street. Mark also worked at Dayringer Bakery in town, owned by Charles Dayringer.

Through much of his decade and a half as a baker and pastry chef, Mark had taken college classes. He loved making pastries, and still does, but he needed more security. Twelve years after taking his first college class, he earned a geology degree from Eastern Michigan. The problem was, there were no available geology jobs in Michigan, so he settled for work in tech support and, eventually, software sales.

Had Mark not taken a trip to Asia in 1987 and ’88, he might be selling software to this day.

But during those seven months backpacking through India, Nepal, Tibet, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, Mark had a spiritual epiphany and became a Buddhist.

He doesn’t take his spirituality lightly. At the tender age of 12, he remembers telling his parents on one particular Sunday morning that he didn’t want to go to Catholic church anymore. Predictably, that didn’t go over well and he ended up at church anyway.

But some of his fundamental concerns remained unanswered. For instance, he’s long struggled with the Christian concept that you’ve got one chance, one life, to determine where you’ll spend eternity. He more readily identifies with the Buddhist concept of reincarnation and rebirth that he learned about in Asia.

Mark says Buddhism not only led to his choosing nursing as a career, it also makes him better in his hospice role of helping patients and families with end-of-life decisions.

“Buddhism teaches that you should meditate on death every day,” he said. “You want to make sure that when you go to your next life you’re carrying as much positive energy as possible.”

Mark wants to share and expand that energy. He’d love to buy a few acres on the outskirts of town and start a little organic farm, complete with goats and chickens, that could also serve as a sort of Buddhist educational retreat. “Kids should learn meditation to sharpen their mind,” he says. “One of the biggest problems in our society is people don’t know how to focus.”

Buying the land and starting a farm and retreat would be a huge undertaking, but don’t dismiss it as pie-in-the-sky musing. Mark likes to say, “I’ve never been afraid to try something new,” and he’s got the track record to prove it.

Kyle Poplin is publisher of The Ann magazine, which is inserted monthly in various print editions of AnnArbor.com. He’s also searching, through this column, for the most interesting person in Ann Arbor. If you have anyone in mind, email your idea to theannmag@gmail.com.