FOLLOWING THE CALL

Following A Call

Career coach and author Richard Leider speaks of each human being having a “daemon; a call that defines their true purpose in life. What a true call is continues to be a question written about in books as popular and recent as The Purpose Driven Life and Richard Spangler’s book, The Call.

Growing up Catholic, I feared the call to be a priest or nun. I was told God in some mysterious way, calls or picks special people to his service. The call was not seen as a path to happiness so much as a difficult but holy path to heaven i.e. eternal happiness. The nuns of my childhood balanced the grim undertones of the call against this comforting knowledge; those picked were special. Praying not to be picked became a regular part of my childhood prayers.

As an adult and a practicing psychotherapist, I have become cynical about the call. I have seen the call become twisted by narcissists into a way to be special. I have seen depressed people use the call as a way to be seen as a martyr. I have seen the call become a way to get what you want or to avoid doing what you should. My adult definition of the call leans more toward Joseph Campbell author of The Hero’s Journey. He writes of following your bliss. These days, I think more about what following your bliss really means across a whole life.

I have worked with people in therapy filled with the disappointment of not making the team, not getting the part, the scholarship. They say to me, I have failed. I didn’t live up to my call. They make failure about character, about talent, about timing, about not trying hard enough. And maybe it is. But I feel, listening to them, this pairing of following their bliss with a divine call can be destructive. It’s like they didn’t just fail; they failed God or the universe or a divine plan.
.
Yet, how divine is the lack of balance almost a prerequisite for a call; or at least the story we tell ourselves about famous, successful people. In the popular book, Outlier’s, author Malcom Gladwell discusses how certain variables play into success in life. If playing the piano is following your bliss then you practice more. Research suggests 10,000 hours of practice leads to high degree of skill; one of the factors in success. Success and passion/ following your bliss combined seem to confirm the true nature of a call.

Ten thousand hours in the teens and twenties is a much different commitment than ten thousand hours at age forty or fifty. I hear the conclusion to this thinking in my practice. My deepest regret people say, is missing my calling. I can’t help but think, so you get one chance or even two at a call between the ages of five and thirty. Then, you are all done. I wonder if we just stop listening, stop allowing a passion to grow because we are all grown up. Or do other voices, work and family grow louder?

There is the torturous, transcendental nature of the call. Popular writers like J.K Rowling, Stephanie Meyer are part of the current media crop of stories about successful writers. The lessons of determination, belief in self and following your bliss despite huge obstacles usually inspires me and my writer friends. I have always used those inspiring stories as a sort of general direction plan as well. The problem is in my practice, I see highly creative people whose passions have changed, enlarged or died during the course of their lives.

Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, famous figures in the Renaissance were highly creative men. Although, they both pursued clear passions in painting and sculpture, their interests in science, engineering, medicine are documented in their journals and sketches. But did their interest in art lead to interest, even a passion for anatomy, science, engineering and designing? Does the life of a genius ever involve a series of passions with the first most financially successful one, eventually just paying the bills?

Too often, my creative clients consider themselves capricious when they move from passion to passion. They consider these changing passions as a failure to be persistent. They don’t see a chain. They see character flaws and a lack of success as huge failures to measure up to the call.

Should a successful lawyer feel a failure because he was a great musician who never performed except for friends? Should he think he failed to heed the call because law paid more than music? In other words because he, in his eyes, was too materialistic?

I am considering the possibility that some people are called to be different things at different times in their lives. Back to our lawyer friend. Should he feel a failure when his call as a musician becomes insistent, his job a boring burden but as a forty year old is undermined by his own decision early on to have six children? Should his wife say follow the music honey and we will move into a townhouse with two bedrooms?

People engaged in the evaluation process of mid life sometimes make dramatic career shifts. I hear clients speak of always having that interest but mortality has pushed its importance into a higher priority. Okay, I end up saying to them, here you are again. So, maybe the persistence of passion validates the call. Twenty years later though, the story of following your bliss should be different. You are different.

Writing for me, has characteristics associated with following your bliss. I forget time, I feel completely caught up in the moment. I feel called to write because expressing myself creatively is a place where I feel like me; authentic, engaged, living in the here and now. I am sure I have spent at least ten thousand hours writing; taken courses, been in writing groups. I am not a successful writer.

Why shouldn’t my perspective, my feelings about writing change as I age?
Is it wrong that sometimes instead of writing I sit on my deck and eat a really good apple? Is it wrong, morally wrong to consider, after ten years of trying to be published, giving up writing for publication?

Summers are a hard time for me. I am pulled by my families increased needs, my own writing goals. The ongoing rejections, I whine to myself, aren’t they telling me something? I feel the pull again. My character says lazy, weak, lacking persistence. Keep trying. My responsibility to my children present a short time in my life really, says enjoy the summer. Don’t have those mornings where you get up early to write, get distracted by the work on a piece and spend every spare minute writing to finish something half available all of a beautiful summer day.

Do I only continue to write because I am persistent? Ten years is a long time. Too many of my writing friends have drifted away from writing; slowly letting the rest of their life take over. Maybe this is the natural way. You change, your life changes. But, I don’t want to drift away from writing without a clear cut decision. I would rather fail and say so.

When I look at my childhood, I can see the murkiness of a truly defined call. Both writing and psychotherapy were familiar areas growing up in my family. My mother is a psychologist, an artist. My father taught English for his entire career. I kept journals and wrote stories without prompting since I was small. Sure, the fact that my dad spent time in his study writing normalized the process and maybe made a love for writing acceptable, natural and more of a call.

My father was a writer whose short stories were never published. He had poetry published but the bliss of writing never fully translated into success as a writer. Are we just a family of bad writers with a twisted call? If I accept this, I feel a crazy blend of fatalism and family failure. Perhaps, my call is to try and fail. Perhaps, writing is something I am intended to do for myself. Somehow, that feels selfish not enough balanced against the bliss of writing, the possible call.

More curious is the type of call. I went running along a familiar bike path today. As I ran, this essay came into my head almost full grown. It was just there as I ran, empty of thought except that it was really hot today. Does the fact that it came to me make my writing divine or destined?

Alas, this has happened before. Sometimes, I will get an idea and lose it or the larger idea in the run, shower and details of the rest of the day. Thinking about all the ideas, all the unpublished, good writers living in the world. I know I won’t give up writing. But without the goal of publication, I know writing will become less of a priority. I have to find other ways, after the summer, to earn money.

But, in exchange, I will have more time this summer for the people I love. Okay so lets be clear. I am not doing this for them. I have spent ten years trying to earn money as a writer. I have failed.

In the film Joe Almighty, Joe is a good newscaster who makes people laugh. Joe spent the entire film struggling against this truth. His ambition, maybe even greed said he needed, in fact deserved more. He tells us he has worked so hard. He had waited to be picked as lead newscaster. He is passed over.

So, in my life, my words have been used in the eulogy of my best friend, helped people by echoing their feelings about grief and loss and hopefully added an interesting thought to the day of many editors and assistants. Thinking and writing have made for great conversations with friends.

In our culture, we celebrate the successful. We do not have a model for celebrating the person who follows the call without a lot of monetary rewards or fame. We celebrate excess, obsession and addiction and then wonder why there is so much depression. Depression is fed with unrealistic expectations, elevating life failures to encompass an entire character and blackening life stories.

In career coaching as in my childhood, I was taught to encourage people in a kind of all or nothing thinking. If you don’t follow your bliss, you are, in some circles, not listening to God’s or the Universes’ plan. When we are called, we must find a way. We are specially designed for our call. It is even a part of the American dream. I think now, that is true for some of us.

But perhaps, we are specifically designed for our call not for success. Maybe passion is built into our genes, programmed somehow in a unique combination of personality preferences and fueled by surrounding environment and character traits such as determination. Maybe talent is merely lucky chance or a genetic whim not part of a divine call Perhaps personality, environment, life’s obligations even dare I say it, the need to eat or the need to have a balanced life as a good parent, good person even, should be considered and applauded as different creative ways we follow our bliss. Maybe the war perspective of good versus evilly materialistic or character flawed should be discounted. Finally, what if the truth is we get multiple calls or passions in life but simply don’t allow them in.

If the call is spiritual, making it difficult or impossible to achieve seems like a divine joke. I believe there is enough disappointment, enough suffering built into an ordinary life. I prefer to believe in God staring in wonder at all the amazing ways the call plays itself out as part of a life.

Couldn’t God really give us each a call not as a divine imperative but as another way to be happy? Maybe we humans linked it to talent, made it about success, about recognition and even about greed. God, she, he or it, made the call about bliss. I like to think following my bliss makes God smile.