We have a lot of baggage around the idea of a calling, we people of this century.
Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered at the fire department and the police station and the water station, he raised three girls with a wife he loved, and when they retired, he dragged my grandmother all over the country on special elder-tours. By all accounts he was satisfied with, even pleased with, his life, without ever engaging the idea that he needed to live out a special mission.
Sometimes people take it too far. I’ve watched more than one college near-graduate refuse to take a job on the grounds that it wasn’t inherently fulfilling to them, blithely neglecting to remember that the only way that works is if someone else, who isn’t necessarily thrilled with every moment of their job, either, subsidizes the project. (I suspect this is rarer now than it once was, the economy being what it is.)
And sometimes it sounds just a bit too religious for our intellectual, post-humanist selves.
Most of us, however, end up somewhere in the middle — longing for a sense of meaning, connection, and purpose while simultaneously not being convinced that anything we’re running up against is It.
It’s like we believe that what we need to do is just find our (avocational) soulmate, and then everything will be fine, everything will unfold after that, but this avocation has a bad sense of humor, and that one is too uptight about money.
This is why leaving academia can feel like divorce, right down to the question of who keeps which friends. We found our One True Love, but what happens when the shine is off that particular rose? Does that mean we’ve failed? Does that mean we’re doomed to marginal happiness ever after?
Just like there’s probably not one person in the whole world who will automatically make you happy forever, there’s no one calling that will make you happy forever. Rather, there’s no simple conception of your calling that will make you happy forever.
Your calling, just like your marriage, your relationships, your life, and you yourself, is always growing and evolving. You’re always learning more about it. New possibilities are always opening up. And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.
Because so many of us experienced our fields and our work as a calling, it can be brutally troubling to run up against dissatisfaction. Because we felt called to academia, realizing that call is no longer there is painful.
I don’t want to suggest that those losses shouldn’t be mourned if you’re experiencing grief. I do want to suggest that you open up your conception of yourself to see what you’re being called to now.
Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world. In other words, while there are any number of things you’re probably good at, and while there are infinite problems in the world to solve, the particular configuration of your heart and this moment illuminate what you’re being called to now.
What are you being called to now? How well does that calling work within the structures of academia?
Very apropos to me right now. I think one reason I want something a bit more from my job is that it does take the best hours of my day and so I’d like to think that those hours are going to a good purpose.
As you counseled in the teleclass last night, that’s an assumption I have that I should examine and question. Maybe a job that takes less time during the week would enable me to use my best hours where I’d prefer to use them. (I just ran into the guy who dropped out of our cohort last semester and he looked much happier.)
I have a brilliant friend, a novelist, who has a rich life away from work, but his day job has hospitalized him for stress and, as he put it, if the job involved heavy machinery he’d have lost several fingers by now. He’d love to write full-time, but his novels’ sales do not provide a means to do that.
Very nicely put. I am now going through all this and your writings often puts what I feel into accurate words.
— Your website is truly useful for some of us who now struggle…
Its not easy, but to all those out there that are currently escaping the tower I should say that it becomes significantly better once you get out of the closet within your close environment. When you tell your colleagues and mentors of your extra-academic plans you will find that some will be sympathetic, some will be supportive, some will be angry, and some will be jealous. Honestly I found, however, that most people don’t care, and just go on with their life.
Most importantly, your friends/partners/family will stand by you and, if they do, they will judge you by who you are and not by the (often hypocritical) standards in the world you wish to leave behind.
I am SO GLAD you wrote this post. I struggled with this for so many years. Now I have gotten to the point in my life where I define sort of the overarching umbrella of all the different things I do as “Free Spirit”, which has been amazingly freeing for me.
“And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.”
So true. I think going back to school was right for me at the time, but now my priorities have shifted, and the dysfunctions of academia just don’t seem worth it. It’s very, very difficult to accept this though.
“Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world.”
On this note, right now I’m volunteering with a local African-centric NGO, doing routine administrative work. While at the office I get to talk to people whose company I genuinely enjoy, unlike the nutty type-As I meet in grad school. So right, now, yes, this place is somewhat of a calling, as my desire to talk to normal people dovetails with the fact that I’m making a small difference in an important organization.