On calling

Writing almost daily may not last but for now it continues because a floodgate has been opened. I’m trying to figure out what is happening because I think it has to do with calling.

A week ago I was thinking that calling was overrated. I could drive myself nuts, and nearly have, figuring out what my calling is, the reason for which I was placed on this earth. I’ve seen some of my friends nearly drive themselves nuts over that question, too.

By contrast, other people I know have quite clear and compelling callings that shape and even dominate their lives, obliterating the divisions between work and play, private and public, and producing remarkable additions to the human enterprise. These people, along with many public personalities, stand as examples that indeed such a thing as calling exists. 

So if some people have it, why doesn’t everybody? But we all do, according to the counselors, spiritual leaders, and self-help gurus who urge the rest of us, the muddling majority, to color our parachutes, leave convention and duty and limits behind, and leap into what we really want to do.

I’ve never known what I really wanted to do.

Sometimes I’ve come close to figuring it out. Yes, I want to write. Do I want to “be a writer”? Well, I’ve done a lot of writing, a lot of it for pay, a lot of it in service to causes in which I believe, and an awful lot trying to figure out why the heck I’m on this earth. But about six months ago I decided to stop thinking of myself as a writer because it was just making me unhappy and, for a host of complicated reasons, feel like a failure.  

That worked for awhile but then I started feeling even unhappier. And it was at the depths of that unhappiness that I had a zingo series of experiences that triggered this blog and voilà! Here I am, happily writing and being a writer. “Happily” is an understatement. I’m in joy. In love with this. And nothing about it could make me feel like a failure. Not even never having more than three readers. Not even having nothing to say on a given day or week. Not even saying too much and getting in trouble for it.

Could it be that this is my calling? If so, “calling” may be a lot smaller than I’ve been thinking. (Think small is my motto for now.)

For one thing, I don’t regret anything in my life that has nothing to do with writing this blog. This is a piece of my life, a piece of the writing I do, but not all of it.

For another, this is a very specific exercise that depends on a whole lot of other things. It depends on the internet: blogging is a new genre that makes possible public journaling and journalism. I believe that is what I have really want to do but I couldn’t have known that because the genre did not exist for most of my life.

It depends, too, on the life I have lived and continue to live outside the exercise. I need to keep wandering in the policy world and the spirit world, seeing the gaps between them and how they intersect and overlap. I need to be a wife, mother, and grandmother. I need dreams and Feldenkrais and Merri Walters’ flower essences. I needed my daughter’s touch on my midback two weeks ago and the explosion of blue behind my eyelids.

Consider the possibility that calling is not a big thing but a small thing, a puzzle piece, the thing that, until you find it, leaves a tiny gap in the otherwise wonderful mosaic of your life. And you never know when that puzzle piece might finally show up.