Your Daily Miracle: Vocation

If you're my age or round about forty, you may be thinking about vocation.  It's associated with, but not the same as, the question that has accompanied us since we were tiny:  What do you want to be when you grow up?  I hear my daughters discussing options: artist, lawyer, teacher, engineer, baker.  Maybe all of them if they have enough time.  For my sixteen, twelve, and ten-year olds, the options are truly, fantastically endless.

An ancient doorway in Cornwall, one that I went through several times with joy :)

When you've crested forty, something happens to those endless doors of opportunity.  It dawns on you that many of them are closed, and then, after a some moments of outrage, you realize you closed many of them.  Maybe without meaning to.  Maybe with a smile, a shrug, even a dismissive laugh.  Or maybe life slammed them shut.  Maybe they creaked closed as a result of a tragedy or a personal sacrifice you made.  But, for whatever reason, they're shut.  As my friend Lindsay Joss-Iudicello so eloquently wrote, you suddenly know you will never be the world's greatest expert on ethics/ferns/philosophy/dogs/fill in blank here.

So, realizing this and grieving it a little, I am trying to move on with confidence into the next decade of my life.  Actually, that's not entirely accurate.  I am trying to move deeper into the next decade of life.  I am trying to rearrange the way I think, from a more linear path to a more mosaic one.  What are the colors that spring from my center?  And what is my center?

Instead of wringing my hands over what I want to be when I grow up, I want to think about who I want to be when I grow up.  Am I becoming the person I always wanted to be: a free person, a loving person, a compassionate person?

My sister and I, in England's Lake District, two years ago

I know I've discussed this at length before so humor me, but the questions I ask as a writer continue to discomfort me: How does my work--quiet, unprofitable (practically poverty-inducing), often hidden, and sometimes seemingly passive, help the world in any significant way?  Or, more pertinently, how does it even help my family?  If Martin brings home the bacon, I bring home the bread crumbs. Or so it seems to me sometimes.

I know the correct, "liberal-arts" answers to these questions: what we give to the world with love is ultimately unquantifiable and mysterious, leading to more grey area and messy, dead-end alleys than mountain tops.  What I do may be listed on my resume, but who I am cannot be.  Writing, art, music, spiritual jobs of all kinds--blur the lines between being and doing, and that, my friends, is both beautiful and frustrating.

During my recent writing retreat, I spent a day reading my friend Christen Mattix's book, Skein, The Heartbreak and Triumphs of a Long Distance Knitter.  My friend Christen heard a lonely, abandoned bench in Bellingham calling her to come inhabit, dwell, be.  So for four years, she knitted a blue line down to the sea.  In rain, hot sun, and fog, she sat on this bench, knitting this seemingly endless blue line that stretched over sidewalks and roads.  For a while, she answered questions about what she was doing: connecting herself to the infinite, building community as folks sat next her and connected over this project, and more.  But near the end of the knit, she stopped answering questions about what she was doing, preferring instead to be, letting this oddly absurd artwork move people in powerful ways.

She interrupted her knit once near the beginning to follow a strong pull to join a convent.  Weeks in this quiet place ultimately led to her to a feeling of dying inside.  Near the end of her tenure at the convent, she met with a priest to discuss whether or not she should leave her specific calling to join this spiritual order.  At the beginning of the conversation, she answered his direct questions with spiritual answers, but then the priest stopped her, begging her not to over-spiritualize.  He asked her what she truly desired, and then he said this magnificent thing:

""God wants you to thrive more than God needs your help.  What are your dreams?"

"I want to be an artist," I blurted out.
"What do you need in order to be an artist?"  he probed.
"I need a supportive community, a job with regular hours, and some structure," I said.
"Go and find those things," he said simply.
And with that, I was tearfully reborn into the world that I thought I had left for good."

Not all of us get an hour with such a priest, but there are many wise voices (Parker Palmer & Mary Oliver are two) counseling us that in order to help the world best, we must be exactly who we were meant to be.  There's that fabulous Buechner quote that tells us that God calls us to a place "where our deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet."

For me, this is writing.  So I curb the panic that seizes me when voices whisper and yell: "Make some money, do something real, go out and work."  I say instead:

I am doing what I am meant to do, and if I do it with all my heart, then I refuse be derailed by the anxiety of what I will produce or accomplish.

I do know one thing:  Who I want to become is a person who can look back at their life and say, I worked hard at what I was given to do, and I loved the best I can, and I left behind some beauty.

This is my vocation.  What is yours? If you have left it for what you thought you should do, may you feel the freedom to be "reborn into the world you thought you had left for good."  If you are continuing along your good path, then may you have the courage to walk it everyday.  May the journey be full of joy, friends.

More good reading for today: Christen's book, of course (link above), and Parker Palmer's latest reflection for "On Being" that includes a heartbreakingly lovely poem by Mary Oliver with the lines: 

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you decided that probably nothing importantis ever easy?