I don’t mean, is it a good calling? (That, after all, makes it sound like a puppy.) I mean, what are the qualities you would use to describe your calling?
After you’ve come at it from lots of different angles, you’ve probably got a sense of what it is or what it looks like, even if you don’t know quite how it’s going to manifest in the world.
Is it creative? Inspiring? Powerful? Quiet? Meditative? Revolutionary? Is it experimental? Purposeful? Curious?
How would you describe it?
This is not a flippant question
The qualities of your calling are as important as the “content” of your calling. In fact, they’re more important.
Because we’ve been so trained to think in terms of “careers” and “jobs” and “tracks” and etc., when we start working on finding our calling, we tend to get stuck in descriptions that at least tangentially fit careers and jobs and tracks.
We want to teach, or we want to research, or we want to invent, or we want to write, or we want to dance, or we want to make beautiful chairs. These are outcomes. These are manifestations.
Your calling, on the other hand, is bigger than outcome and bigger than manifestation. Your calling is about what special quality, what special message you bring to the world.
I think Martha Graham said it best:
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.
That vitality she points to, that life force — that’s your calling. And it is unique. It cannot and will not be duplicated or repeated by anyone else, no matter how many other people have the same job title or work in the same field or career.
Words will not encompass it
Your true calling is a lot like the impetus a writer has for a novel. The best novels can’t exactly be reduced to a “message,” but at the same time, you get something out of them — you’re changed. There’s something there.
Our callings, too, can’t be reduced to a message, but we can point to them the same way we can describe a really good novel.
Even though we can’t express our callings fully in words, pointing to it with qualities is useful because that pointing gives us a direction. It gives us something to measure our manifestations against. It gives us something to return to regardless of what happens in our jobs and our careers.
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