On living your 'calling'.

How do you know you are on the right track?

Yesterday my friend Sharon Blackie wrote one of her eloquent and erudite posts on her Substack The Art of Enchantment . She tackled the subject of having a life purpose or ‘calling’ and in particular whether it should bring us pleasure or if an experience coir pain is part and parcel of calling. The wonder of Substack is the ability to respond and form a dialogue between writers and so I wanted to write about the same topic but from a slightly different angle. I don’t set out to disagree but to triangulate and confirm some of what she said but also to bust some of the myths I believe confuse the idea of ‘calling’ . I also come to a slightly different but I think complementary conclusion to Sharon’s.

The question:

I strongly encourage you to read Sharon’s article as it contains much wisdom - you can find it here. But for those of you who are time-pushed let me summarise the reasons she wrote it. A writer referred to as M (unknown to me and who I am assuming from her words to be female) described herself as knowing that being writer is what she is ‘for’. It is what gives her purpose and meaning. Yet, it is also actively painful to her most of the time and causes her the ‘purest form of misery’. She is lonely and with precarious finances and feels she cannot escape. She wanted to know if that was just her lot or if there was something she could do to find writing pleasurable. I can’t help but hear her anguish and wanted to offer a word or two of my own in response.

However, this essay is, I hope, relevant for all of you who read here. Although this sounds an agonisingly extreme situation, I believe that many of us when we arrive at the second halves of our lives start to ask questions about calling and purpose. We might wonder if such a thing exists at all. We might worry that it does but we have no clue what ours is and fear we are running out of time to find it. Perhaps you have a good sense of your life’s calling but have been finding it impossible to actually get to because of the practicalities or vicissitudes of life. Some of us will have lived a life with a sense of having known our calling all along but then find illness, bereavement, redundancy or retirement cause us to feel we have lost it. Some, like M, will feel trapped in a calling that feels miserable.

How do we know what our calling is and how do we know we are on the right track to living it?

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Sources of possible answers:

In tackling this heartfelt question from M, Sharon provides us with a wonderful summary of the idea of what a ‘calling’ is based primarily on the teachings of Plato and the depth psychologist James Hillman, both of whom suggest (and I paraphrase here) that we arrive into the world with an purpose or a destiny, initially unknown, and it is our job to express it during the course of our lives.

I confess that I am by nature a questioning and challenging character and my immediate thought was: Two men say it. Does that make it true? This essay stems in great part from my time spent pondering that self-set question but also from my life experience in trying to understand my own calling.

Existential questions like this may never have an scientifically proven answer. However I believe that when we find the same ideas in multiple forms in different cultures then there is a ‘truth’ there that is worth looking at even if it is expressed different ways. Indeed the fact that we can get to it from different traditions and stories is to me an indication that it is something the Universe/God/insert-here-whatever-word-makes-you-comfortable wants us to be able to access. Sharon references briefly the Japanese idea of Ikagi - a concept although is originally about life purpose in general sense but which has been taken by the West and adapted, as I shall return to later.

I thought it would be interesting to add to the discussion a perspective from the Jewish traditions before circling back round to what this has to do with creativity and then answering M’s question myself. As I have said before, I practice the Reform Jewish tradition which is based on choice through knowledge. So read and take from this what helps you and discard the rest. I use these texts not to persuade you to a religious position but to offer a different perspective on a wider life wisdom.

Wisdom from Jewish tradition:

On the face of it the idea of a ‘calling’ in Biblical stories ( the Jewish Tanakh or what Christians call The Old Testament) is a rather external one. We have multiple stories of men being ‘called’ by a literal voice of God to go and take up a challenge. Moses for example was sent by the voice of God from a burning bush to go to Pharaoh and to be the instigator in the freeing of the Israelites from slavery and to be the leader that would take then to the Promised Land. The prophet Isaiah hears a voice thundering from the clouds telling him his destiny. Elijah hears the voice not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire but in a still small voice, but he still got sent to anoint kings and change the course of his nation. Pretty big dramatic stuff,

From a simple reading of stories such as this we get a Judeo-Christian tradition that translates to secular life as the idea that we have one big task in life to fulfil. It can be portrayed as a hero’s journey kind of quest that will fill our life and be a single guiding task. We start to search for it and worry that we don’t have this one big thing. It appears as an externally given purpose, something which might at first be hidden until the command comes or the secret is revealed. How many of us have ever had such a clear, external, revelatory revealing of our purpose? Not many.

However, in Jewish tradition, these stories can be read at four levels. The practice of this layered approach is called PaRDeS. It can be applied to any form of reading - there is a wonderful book and podcast called Harry Potter and the Sacred Text in which Casper ter Kuile and Vanessa Zoltan use this method on JK Rowling’s work. They state their mission as “We treat texts as sacred to learn to treat each other as sacred,” which is surely a reason to go and read their work!

PaRDeS is an acronym for four levels of reading expressed in Hebrew as:

1. P'shat (straight, direct, literal)

2. Remez (hinted-at)

3. D'rash (inquire, seek) and

4. Sod (secret, mysterious).

In other words we are encouraged to look beyond the simple story, which, in the Biblical ones, is often troublesome to our current Western egalitarian sensibilities and to look at what’s less obvious, what needs searching out. We are sent to look at the part of the story we can’t prove or understand on a human level but which seems to invoke some kind of life mystery - just like this issue of ‘calling’. In Jewish learning there is also a tendency to cross reference across texts to look for patterns. ( Incidentally there is also the concept of chavrutah - learning with a partner to spark ideas off, which is I guess is kind of what I am doing with Sharon here!)

If we look at all these stories of Biblical people who receive a calling we see a common Hebrew word in their response: Hineni. This is often translated into English as “Here I am”, which is a bit odd if you think of it. I am pretty sure that if we take the stories literally, when God was talking to Moses from a burning bush or yelling at Elijah from a cloud he knew where they were. Why then did they say, “Here I am!”?

It makes more sense when we seek a deeper meaning and think of it as a moment of self-recognition. An opportunity came, a need was revealed, a challenge laid down and they said: Hineni! Oh! I see myself in this. Here I am! This is me. The Hineni moment immediately precedes the response of “Send me”. The internal moment of self-knowledge, of the ‘fit’ between self and external opportunity comes before the choice to take action.

.Calling is not necessarily the drama of a distinctly described, huge life task but the concept and process of continually making ourselves available to opportunities that fit our personality and talents.

In Jerusalem there is a well known design school called Bezalel Academy of Arts ad Design. (You can see some of the graduate showcases here). It is named after a master craftsman who worked in many different media and who coordinated a team of craftsman to build the mishkan ( tabernacle) which travelled in the desert with the Israelites as the home of God. Again a pretty important task! However, neither Bezalel not any of his workers received this thunderbolt set of orders from God. The story says that Moses put out a call to ‘every wise-hearted man, in whose heart the LORD had put wisdom, every one whose heart stirred him up to come unto the work to do it.’ ( Exodus 36 v 2).

So a ‘calling’ can be a simple understanding that a request fits with what we can do and that we desire to make ourselves available for it.

Myths about calling:

On myth about calling is that there is one activity we should undertake, to the exclusion of all else, for the rest of our lives. We might indeed have peak projects that we will be best known for but the reality is that Bezalel was not called only to build the Mishkan, he was called to be a craftsman to learn and experiment ( and these days we might slightly critically say ‘flit between’) a variety of jobs. Ultimately he was described as having ability, intelligence, and knowledge in every kind of craft, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, in every kind of craft. The calling was to live his creativity as fully as he could even when he was not on that peak project.

Logically this must be so. Calling cannot be what we produce, it has to be who we are and how we live. Otherwise what is the point of life after the peak project? After a career? After mothers see children flit the nest? On weekends? when we lose a job? Are we prepared to say that we are not called to do anything but one job? Are we prepared to say our careers, vocations or practices are the entirety of who we are as people and all that matter? I am not.

A calling is more than one single job, project, career or activity. As Walt Whitman said: We are multitudes. I believe it is about saying Hineni. I am here! and showing up fully and with availability to service and new experience whenever something that aligns with our internal sense of self shows up.

Another myth is that calling is only about what we do in the world and how we make money or leave a legacy. In Judaism there are two strands to calling. One is indeed public and relies on using our strengths and qualities in service of a cause we are passionate about to make a transformational impact on our surroundings. The second however is private. The Mussar movement is a system virtue based ethics. It is about grappling with your weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Here the ‘calling’ is to deal with the moral and spiritual challenges we find most difficult to overcome, to become a better person despite our fears and limitations. Even Moses with his lofty life purpose had to overcome his fear of public speaking and his inappropriate anger.

Sometimes, our calling is to say Hineini! when we face frustration and disappointment because we must work a day job to pay bills when we would rather be in the studio. It is to say Hineni! and face our own impatience or perfectionism when our art requires us to sit for yet another day grappling with a sentence that won’t come our right or a weaving that has perpetually tangled threads. It is to say Hineni! when we face a creative dry spell and must overcome our own doubt and uncertainty about our skills and voice. It is to say Hineni! even when we are unsure who we are at core, when the only part of us we can identify as authentic is the part of us that is expressing that deep uncertainty and who can still say, “I am fully here for this time not-knowing.”

Pleasure and pain as they relate to calling:

So where does all this take us in considering the pure misery that M believes her calling is bringing her? Am I saying, sorry, yes your life is meant to be horrible, it’s your lot to learn to cope with that, it will make you a better person. Sorry about that!”

No. I am not. Not at all.

Sharon in her response wrote:

we grow through joy, but we also grow through difficulty and pain. I may not be typical, but I do firmly believe, and have experienced it so, that the most profound growth comes from doing things that are painful or difficult.

And that is true. There is no question that moments of pain can be life giving. again as Sharon writes:

Writing requires never ending, daily, ‘deliberate practice’: purposeful acts of persistence and intense focus, in order to cultivate the habits and skills we need to excel at our craft.

But if we can find both the discipline and the desire – our soul’s ‘Necessity’, to steal from Plato – then the psychological rewards can be profound.

Again I wholeheartedly agree (except perhaps the with the daily bit). However, I believe that there are two different things at play here. The first is the temporary difficulty along the way, the momentary struggle from which we break through into pleasure and reward. This is what Sharon describes. In this case the pain itself is not pleasurable but the enduring of it for a tolerable period allows us to access the pleasure. Indeed, many people set themselves very uncomfortable and painful challenges just for the sheer pleasure of overcoming them.

The second issue is when life as a whole, on in the main, is utterly miserable. When nothing is giving way to pleasure and when we feel scared, deprived, precarious and lonely all the time. Whereas in the former situation we feel the calling is doing us good overall even if it has tough patches, here whatever we are doing feels like it is killing us. Yet simultaneously it feels like what we must be doing. In short it feels like our calling is a trap, a cage, a tortuous emotional prison. Can a true calling, followed as it should be, ever be that way?

I would say not. There will be life circumstances which feel that way and in which a calling can be practiced nonetheless. The best example of this is the work that psychotherapist Viktor Frankl did with his fellow prisoners in Auschwitz. He fathomed that if he could help them find just one unfinished task that they needed to complete in life that helped them find strength to survive in the face of the most abhorrent circumstances. The call was what got people though the pain but he never suggested that the calling itself was to be in Auschwitz.

Orthodox Judaism holds men to 363 different commandments ( women fewer). On top of those are more rules created by Rabbi’s as ‘fences’ to stop people accidentally breaking the core rules. It’s pretty hard and restrictive. Yet the teaching ( from Proverbs and stated in Hebrew as the principle of ‘darchei noam’ is that all of the Torah’s ways “are ways of pleasantness, and all its pathways are peace.” Note that it doesn’t say that all the places are pleasant and peaceful, it’s the path that is; the overall journey. In other words we may have moments of that part that go through dark forests and up steep inclines. There will be times when the rules hurt or we face difficult painful situations. The journey overall is meant to be peaceful and pleasant. We are not aiming for a life of pain and pure misery as our calling.

Ameliorating inappropriate pain:

So, if we feel pure misery what does it mean? That we are not living our true calling after all? Possibly. Certainly people enter careers and life practices genuinely believing that it is their own desire when really it is the wish of family or societal pressures and it takes a long time to come to that realisation. In these cases a change is due and the work ( the mussar) becomes to do the work of being able to truly say Hineni! Ah, here is me! Here I am after all! Now, what do I truly need? This need not be a massive shift a new career or practice, though sometime it absolutely is. It can be an adjustment to an adjacent practice, or a different process within the practice. We can be very close to doing the right thing but actually in a very wrong place. Just because we have the ability to do something doesn’t mean we have the aptitude to spent a life doing it or to do it in any given environment.

It not always that stark a situation, however. It could be that the feeling of pure misery are actually a symptom of a mental health issue that cloud the whole of life and which is therefore making the calling feel dire. Then one approach is to treat oneself with kindness and seek talk therapy and/or medication. And there creativity - especially private unpressured creativity is a healing balm, as I know from my own experience and as Sharon points out when she says:

I believe that the beauty we produce and the satisfaction and joy of producing it is a wonderful cure – or at least, an aid – for any psychological malaise.

It can also be that the calling is absolutely the correct one but that it is not being practiced in the right format. So often we assume a calling must be done full time at all costs. We are writers, artist, homeopaths, poets, dancers, mystics or whatever. So that is now we must earn a living. Not so. What we are called to do may but does not have to always coincide with how we pay the bills. If you know your creative practice is an expression of your calling but you can’t make the rent with it or cannot find a community with it then you are not called to live precariously and with loneliness. You are called to be a writer and to approach the world from that viewpoint. But you are also called to take a day job so that you have the practical support you and your calling needs. Then you can do your writing from a place of peace and pleasantness.

The Japanese concept of Ikagki Sharon mentioned is now often portrayed as a four strand set of questions to help you find your life’s purpose which will lie at the intersection of

1. What you are good at

2. What you love

3. What the word needs

4. What you can be paid for.

However, the latter question seems to have been added at the time the concept was adopted by career counsellors and bloggers in the West and is not necessarily a key focus of the long living retirees Sharon so rightly points out benefits from this concept.

Loving doing something is however a key component of calling. It’s in Judaic tradition, in Ikagi and it’s also in more secular expressions of calling. Michael Novak in his book Business as a Calling for examples identifies four characteristics of a calling:

1. Its unique to you

2. You have the talent for it

3. Its something when you do it give you a sense of enjoyment and renewed energy

4. Is not revealed immediately.

(The words unique and talent deserve unpacking in posts of their own but that’s for another day!) The point is that pleasure, energy and rewarding enjoyment are commonly accepted as being baked into your life purpose.

Also, it can be easy to mis-identify the activity we do as an expression of our calling as the calling itself. Then when the activity falters or ceases to bring us peace and pleasantness, we doubt the calling. In fact the calling is something underneath the activity. If I may, let me use myself as an illustration.

I knew I wanted to be a family lawyer as a teen. It was a perfect fit for me. I loved it , I was good at it, the world needed such help and it paid well. I succeeded. then it all fell apart and I burned out and lost that career totally. Did it mean my calling was wrong? Did it mean my calling was over and that I was now fit for nothing, used and spent for the rest of my life? I certainly spent some time believing those things. Then, with help of wise people like Sharon ( especially in her book Hagitude) I worked it out; the law was one expression of a deeper wider calling which has much more to do with being an agent for transformation, synthesis, resolution and reconstruction. That calling can be expressed in all my current activities which include coaching, training lawyers, writing, art, volunteering. I am multitudes.

Concluding thoughts:

In her letter to Sharon, M described her painful experiences and said “All these things make sense if I can produce work I'm proud of, work that I feel matters in some way.” Then later she says wistfully “Other creative people I know seem to find playfulness and joy in their work.”

As I say, I only have this reported letter to go on and M herself has not asked for my advice or help so I will not be arrogant enough to attempt to give it. However, the misery described is not sadly unique and Indeed is very resonant of how I felt at the end of my legal career and before I retrained. I can therefore, imagine how a coaching session with a client with similar problems might go, depending on their willingness and needs.

We might be asking if he felt able to explore that topic of meaning more. What kind of meaning and pride did writing give? Where else might he find that? How else might he express herself with the same results? Or even better expanded results? What else might be added to life to provide what is missing? I’d be curious about the line of sense making that drew a linear link between pain and pride. Where did that logic come from? Is it a serving him well? Is there an acceptable alternative he can shift to? I’d definitely explore that genuine intrinsic longing for play and joy and ask, how can they say Hineini! to that?

And having imagined that conversation I am also now checking in with myself. What am I struggling with in my creative practice? Is it necessary struggle, a life-giving challenge or because I am veering off my path? am I allowing enough play and joy?

A calling can be expressed in more than one form. We do not fail it if we step away from it to rest, to recuperate, to gather emotional economic and physical resources. A calling is not meant to be all consuming, eating us up. To respond to a calling is to hear everything that is within us, not just the singular ability to serve the world with our creativity but also our heartfelt craving for joy and peace and company.

Whilst it requires discipline to get through the temporary challenges, our callings do not require a level of dedication that tips into of self-flagellation. We are not called to deprivation of economic security, social interaction and the feelings of safety and freedom. Indeed as Maslow pointed out in his hierarchy of needs, we cannot ever really focus on self-actualisation if we do not have these basic needs met. A calling does not require us to give out all the time, to only exist for public benefit. It also requires of us the the internal time to care for ourselves and to take ourselves on paths of pleasantness and peace.

Callings, can however be slippery things to which to hold fast. the more we live according to them the more they reveal themselves. Thinking deeply about our own sense calling from time to time can bring clarity and, if not a voice-from -the clouds-certainty, at least a sense of sure footed direction. For the inspiration to do just that I wholeheartedly thank both M fr her vulnerability and honesty and Sharon for her professional knowledge and personal wisdom.

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It is undoubtedly part of my calling to create long thoughtful researched and free to all articles like this. It is my pleasure to do so. However, I also produce one long post each month for paid subscribers which has more direct coaching material in it. If you would like that material or just feel called to support the work I do for free please do consider a paid subscription. Otherwise, enjoy the free stuff - its for you!