How to Find Your Life’s Calling.
By finding something selfless.
“An idea is a magnet. It draws to it everyone it needs to express itself.” Richard Bach
I am absorbed in writing my first book. It’s a story of an angry, disillusioned middle-aged man looking for his calling. It’s a story about how his picture postcard life has left him stranded on a meaningless island from which he wants to escape.
As I write each chapter I notice that the story seems to have a refrain. Like a melody underneath all the lyrics and the verse. Like a faint pencil sketch that has been rubbed out behind the formal black ink visage.
It’s like a very faint outline of a longing that keeps coming and going through the passing years of my life. Extremely shy yet very persistent. The odd thing about all this is that I know that melody so well. It’s hauntingly familiar. Yet I can’t remember it.
To make things harder the book is exposing the biggest lie of my life. The lie that I had found my calling when I was 18. It’s shredding all the certificates and crushing all the trophies that prove that I was getting better and better and that the last 20 years had been well spent chasing that dream.
It’s dashing the biggest truth I lived by that being a global advertising and marketing guru was my calling. The act of writing the book is showing me that it was not. And that truth hurts. But sometimes pain is the best signpost to a cure.
If you find yourself in a similar place I would offer you these words below as a place to rest and reflect for a moment.
“There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they’re necessary to reach the places we’ve chosen to go.” Richard Bach.
Do we need a calling? Is it necessary to be successful, happy, healthy, and live a normal life?
My answer so far is: It’s not necessary, to have a good life. But essential to feel completely absorbed with life.
I can see one voice in my head yawn and the other smile.
A calling for me is a way to live a life where every moment becomes a dot that connects to the next one sizzling with excitement and energy. That all these dots act in unison and fly in a formation that is much greater than our own wingspan will ever achieve.
In my experience, a calling is greater than a job, a career, and a mission. It’s a vision that one will never really achieve in one’s life. It’s greater than what you can ever accomplish. You can just contribute to it. Yet that is all that you seek in all that you do.
For me, a true calling has one unique character trait- it makes you feel completely fulfilled in the act of striving for it. The act of doing it is rewarding enough.
So for example — right now I write these words to make sense and clarify my thoughts. The goal is to help you understand my logic. But the calling is to inspire a shift in perspective and maybe help a fellow seeker to stay on the path.
As I use my book as my Tapasya to find my calling I am beginning to see the pattern in the sky of my life has something to do with being of service to those out there who are living normal healthy lives but may be seeking a higher calling but not knowing where or how to look.
What is your version of my book writing? Where are you searching? Who are you learning from? What is absorbing your attention? What is making you stop following your hunch?
Coda:
The most important thing in life is to honor your unique crazy way in the service of something greater than yourself. Follow that hunch you have. Keep working on it. Don’t give up. Let your calling wake you up. Let it emerge in you. Make space for it. Your whole life is ahead of you. Make it a calling.
