At this threshold, I began hearing a calling to quit my job and become a freelance writer, a decision that’s not exactly designed to reassure one’s parents, and one that I couldn’t bring myself to make for years anyway, though the gods were drumming their fingers, and though I was slowly over-ripening and rotting on the vine. In the back of my mind, I heard the whispered admonition of an old Roman saying: The Fates lead those who will. Those who won’t, they drag. Like most people, however, I would not follow the calling until the fear of doing so was finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, though I discovered — and continue to discover — that I have an appallingly high threshold for this quality of pain. But eventually the prospect of emotional and even financial turmoil, the disapproval of others, and the various conniptions of change seemed preferable to the psychological death I was experiencing by staying put----at which point I followed a bit of cowboy wisdom: when your horse dies, get off! I have not once regretted it, though it was damnably hard. In other words, like anyone who chooses passion over security — perhaps the central drama in people’s relationship to their callings — I was plagued by the fear that scares away sleep. And it wasn’t that I finally overcame the fear. It was that something else became more important than the fear: being in right relationship to myself, making my life literally "come true." Creating passionate, productive, and callings-inspired work (and workplaces) begins with the individual, with the corpus (body) that defines the corporation, defines the word corporation. It involves the sometimes pick-and-shovel work of aligning or realigning with your own passion and sense of purpose, with what you personally want to contribute to the world, with your deepest values rather than just the advertised values, and with a fit between who you are and what you do, which I consider the best kind of success. The more passionate you are, the more productive — the more you desire to produce — and the less hot condensed breath anyone will need to leave on the back of your neck to get you inspired to work. In fact, any leap you want to make in your professional or personal life that will bring you this sense of alignment and aliveness is, by definition, a calling. That calling could be to make a career change or a creative leap, to take on a new role or let go of an old one, to launch a new venture or style of leadership, or to simply make a course-correction in your life or work. And what goes for the individual goes for "the company you keep," whether that company is your family, your workplace, your church, your community, or your planet. That is, the more we as individuals address these struggles with alignment and misalignment in our own lives, the more we encourage the communities of which we are each a part to do the same. There’s a reason why some of the world’s great myths, like Sleeping Beauty and the Grail King, speak to the idea that when we sleep, those around us also sleep and the kingdom goes dormant, but when we awaken, those around us also awaken and the kingdom flowers. Unfortunately, most people simply tune out the callings and longings they feel rather than confront and act on them, trading authenticity for security and settling for less. In this sense, money costs too much. The price people are willing to pay to have it is way too steep. It’s terribly easy to build for yourself a velvet cage: the money is great, the perks enviable, the surroundings familiar, and the security comforting, but you end up becoming at best a recreational user of your passion and creativity. We’re all conservatives when it comes to change. We want to conserve the status quo. We want to protect our investments, and the more investments we have, and the more success, the harder it is to let it go. So although the soul doesn’t seem to care what price we have to pay to follow our callings, we still react to change with a reflexive flinch, the way snails recoil at the touch. As an acquaintance of mine once put it, "You shall know the truth and it shall make you nap." The soul is a spiritual organ that we carry to work with us every day, and it informs and observes every move we make. There is no ignoring its demands with impunity. It is capable of meting out punishments as real as any that could be meted out by a boss. It is the ultimate BS-detector, the part of us that absolutely knows what it knows, that knows the feel of integrity and the feel of its absence. The callings it sends out and receives are like organisms, living entities. They exert a centrifugal force on our lives, continually pushing out from within. They drive us toward authenticity and aliveness, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, and they are metered by the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour, which is always later than we imagine (I ran across this bumper sticker recently: "Warning: dates in calendar are closer than they appear"). If we are at all faithful to our calls, to the driving force of soul in our lives, they will lead us to points of decision. Here we must decide whether to say yes or no, now or later, ready or not. And they will keep coming back until we give them answers. Saying yes to a call tends to place us on a path that half of ourselves thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows our lives won’t make sense without. We find ourselves following the blind spiritual instinct that tells us our lives have purpose and meaning, that this calling is part of it, and that we must act on it despite the temptations to back down and run for cover that will divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves. I used to do a lot of stone sculpting, and when you want to find out whether a stone is "true," you bang on it with a hammer. If it gives off a dull tone, it means the stone has faults running through it that will crack it apart when you work on it. But if it gives off a clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, it means the stone is true, has integrity, and most importantly will hold up under repeated blows. That is the same information we want about our visions and ventures and callings. We want to know that they’re going to hold up under repeated blows, and among the best ways to determine this is simply to bang on them, and listen. To take them out, or rather down from the abstract into the physical, and let them get banged on by the mortal world. Let the fear and resistance come, let people have their say, let the chaos blow through, because you understand that resistance is part of a calling, not opposed to it, because moving and shaking go together, and because chaos is part of the creative process. In fact, in the central creation story in Western cosmology — the Bible — Chaos with a capital C is described as simply the condition of the earth before it was formed. In other words, Chaos precedes Creation. We deny ourselves one, we deny ourselves the other. Ultimately, none of us wants bumper stickers on our cars that say, "I’d rather be sailing," or "The worst day fishing is better than the best day working." We want to do what we’d rather be doing. We want our lives — and the work to which we are devoting our lives — to catch fire and burn blue, not smolder. We want to feel called, not just driven. We want work to be a channel through which we express our passion and vitality, not a chin-up bar we have to pull ourselves up to every morning. And we want success to be a way we feel, not just a thing we achieve. To do this, we must incorporate into our lives and our work the understanding that hidden deep in the clockworks of the human heart is the beneficent fear of living life, as Henry Miller once put it, without ever leaving the birdcage, and that this fear can be the beginning of great things. Outside the cage is life in all its toothsome grandeur, all the spill and stomp and shout of it, all the come and go of it, all of it waiting for us to act on the one hand, and on the other hand rushing down the hourglass. And when we act, when we give ourselves over — through our own courage — to a life of passion and aliveness, that life reciprocates. Our devotion to our calls, to the implorings of soul and spirit, sets up something akin to a magnetic or gravitational field, and it draws things to us: resources, contacts, opportunities, interest, insights, instructional dreams and synchronicities — all manner of helping hands. Perhaps it is no more mysterious than that life supports growth, like attracts like, and our lives mirror what we put into them. Saying yes to ourselves is one way to love our lives, to flood them with light that can shine back out of them. Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, has been published in the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Psychology Today. A fulltime speaker and seminar leader in the business, educational, and human-potential arenas, he travels extensively, offering Callings workshops and lectures. He can be reached at <callings@gregglevoy.com>, (520) 760-1231, or <http://www.gregglevoy.com/>. |
I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, back in my twenties, and after working there for a the better part of a decade, I reached a threshold — the word in this case having a double meaning as both a point of transition and a measurement of my tolerance for pain.