The Calling

Rethinking the way we choose our futures or allow them to choose us

Photo by Jens Lelie on Unsplash

For years I told students to stop trying to choose their future paths. Instead I told them to listen to their experiences and let their future paths choose them. I was telling them to watch for a calling. Now that I find myself in transition, I’m wondering if I ought to take my own advice. 

Finding a calling checks all of the boxes for purpose. But it can also reduce purpose to one thing, which leaves little room for flexibility, change, or failure. In Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark, Thea Kronborg believes she is called to be a great artist. She tells her mentor, “If I fail, you'd better forget about me, for I'll be one of the worst women that ever lived. I'll be an awful woman!” 

There is something romantic about feeling chosen, entrusted with gifts that must be used in a particular way. But that mindset can be a heavy burden to carry. My kids love Encanto, and I’ve heard the song “Surface Pressure” more times than I care to admit. Nearly everyone in the Madrigal family has been entrusted with a superpower that consumes their whole identity. Luisa’s gift is phenomenal strength, and she uses it to help others. But she also recognizes that if her gift were taken away, she’d be lost. “Under the surface,” she says, “I’m pretty sure I’m worthless if I can’t be of service.” 

My own choice of an academic career hinged on a mixture of Thea’s and Luisa’s thinking. I believed that my future path chose me in an English class where I read My Ántonia and saw, for the first time, my own family history transformed into literature. My professors praised my writing and encouraged me to pursue it further in graduate school. I felt called to be a teacher and writer because I felt most myself doing those things and I was good at them. My talents might not have been superhuman gifts, but I felt, like Luisa, that by embracing my strengths I was also serving others. My outlook was a fairly humorless take on Pudd’nhead Wilson’s advice: “Behold the fool saith, ‘Put not all thine eggs in the one basket’...but the wise man saith, ‘Put all your eggs in the one basket and--WATCH THAT BASKET.’”

What I could not have predicted is that I would discover more than one calling. When I began dating the woman I would later marry, I knew that I’d have to redefine the monastic life I’d been living up to that point: teaching by day and churning out articles, stories, and poems by night. When I held our first child after her birth, I felt my center of gravity shift again, and then twice more as two more children joined us. A colleague recently shared an aphorism that captures conventional expectations for women, but that increasingly applies to fathers, too: that you need to work like you have no kids and parent like you have no job. Even if you know that your family comes first, it can be hard to sustain your parent/professional identities when work feels like a calling that cannibalizes all others. 

Like millions of people, I began questioning this paradigm when COVID-19 hit. Most days I felt like I was failing on all fronts, offering subpar teaching to my students on Zoom and suspending my research and creative writing entirely, then carrying that frustration into the time I had with my family. There is not much worse than feeling that you were born to do something and then doing it poorly. I was well on my way to living Thea Kronborg’s nightmare of failure. I began probing the “why” of my academic work and found that not much of it justified the strain it was putting on my family. 

The thing about a calling is that it can make you feel indispensable. After my first sabbatical, I was astounded to discover that the committee I’d poured many hours into for three years was still debating the same policy questions a full year after I’d been away. Other people taught my courses during that time. Life went on. I felt the question flickering in the back of my thoughts: am I really called to do this if others can fill my place when I’m gone? The pandemic forced me to confront this question in a more serious way. When my wife’s business grew to the point that we could consider moving closer to family without me needing to work, the thought of my children building closer bonds with their grandparents during their formative years answered the question for good, and I resigned my position. 

Giving up my calling felt like losing my faith. Because I was taught to find the thing I loved, so I never had to work a day in my life, I endured a long period of denial about changing course and intense grief about what I had lost afterward. As I contemplate my next move professionally, I know that there is danger in searching for a new calling or seeking to revive the one I left behind. The challenge is to remain passionate about writing and teaching, or a new vocation that I’ve not yet discovered, without reducing identity and purpose to a singular pursuit. In this regard, I feel like I’m a farmer transitioning from a monoculture – thousands of acres planted with a single crop – to a smaller-scale operation with more diversified interests. A farmer I know in Iowa sells vegetables, fruit, honey, jam, and alpaca wool in part because she loves the variety, but also because each venture insures the rest. A bad year for one product might be a boon to another. If Thea Kronborg had more eggs in more baskets, it’s possible that she wouldn’t feel that her future would only be defined by success or despair. 

When I advised my students to let their future paths choose them, I meant to give them permission to experiment, to try different identities on for a good fit. I hoped that they might find a profession that didn’t just sound good on paper or look good in the bank, but that also echoed deeply with their passions. But I realize now that finding one calling wouldn’t mean that my students would never find another, or that they could not sustain multiple vocations. There are dozens of ways to live our lives with meaning and purpose. For my part, I wonder if the biggest trap to avoid is mistaking any one of those roles as the single thing I was born to do.