Thus we cannot know whether a cigar is indeed just a cigar without studying it. We cannot declare a happenstance “just a coincidence” without looking at whether it corresponds to a theme or an issue in our lives. We cannot know whether the voices we hear are those of inner guides or just the babble in Babylon, without submitting to the ceaseless thrum of our own intuitions over a period of time.
If you’re bored with your work, for instance, does that mean you need to leave it or change it? Does falling in love with Someone Else signal that your marriage needs dissolution or attention? If you didn’t get the job, does that mean you weren’t supposed to pursue the career, or that the rejection is a test of your resolve? If you can’t get pregnant, is it that you’re not meant to, you’re meant to redefine parenting, or that it’s a medical problem that means nothing? Is a calling true if it’s propelled, in part, by a desire to prove something? If you’re afraid, does it suggest the need for courage and a leap of faith, or a backing-up and re-evaluation? How do you know when you’re procrastinating or when the answer you seek simply hasn’t revealed itself to you yet?
The channels through which callings come----whether dreams and symptoms or intuitions and accidents----are like oracles of any kind. They aren’t meant to be treated as psychic vending machines, merely dispensing information. They are to be approached for dialogue, entered into in the spirit of co-respondence and what the poet William Butler Yeats called “radical innocence.” Their answers are typically metaphoric, paradoxical, poetic and dreamlike, and require reflection and conversation.
SHAKEN UP
Recently, an acquaintance of mine who has searched for many years for a sense of direction and mission, revealed that he was waiting for “an unshakable vision.” I immediately thought of the work of the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for his theory of what he calls “dissipative structures,” a somewhat lumpy way of saying that friction is a fundamental property of nature and nothing grows without it----not mountains, not pearls, not people.
It is precisely the quality of fragility, he says, the capacity for being “shaken up,” that is paradoxically the key to growth. Any structure----whether at the molecular, chemical, physical, social or psychological level----that is insulated from disturbance is also protected from change. It becomes stagnant. If a vision----if anything----is true to life, to the imperatives of creation and evolution, it won’t be unshakable.
We must therefore be willing to get shaken up, to submit ourselves to the dark blossomings of chaos, in order to reap the blessings of growth. Much of this is axiomatic: stress often prompts breakthroughs; crises point toward opportunities; chaos is an integral phase of the creative process; and protest abets the cause of democracy. The whole science of immunization is based on this wisdom: we introduce a little bit of chaos in order to prevent a lot of chaos. Just enough, but not too much. We shake up the system for the sake of helping it evolve.
If you aren’t willing to get shaken up, you also run into a discernment problem. If you hang on to the belief that you can have an unshakable vision, and then your call falters in any way----you follow it and something painful happens, it comes but then goes away, you drive into a tunnel and lose the reception----you will probably conclude that it wasn’t your true calling to begin with because.....it shook!
One reason why calls, almost by definition, shake us up is that in the same breath that a call is uttered, so is suffering. Not merely because a call, as Jonah discovered, rocks the boat, but also because calls often point to passions, and passion derives from a word meaning to suffer.
Being unwilling to do so, to bear the hurly-burly of faithfulness, we court disaster----Latin for “against one’s stars”----and we end up agitated anyway. Everything we do, the Sufi poet Kabir said, will have a kind of “weird failure” in it. We’ll feel alienated from ourselves, listless and frustrated, and fitful with boredom, the common cold of the soul. Life will feel so penetratingly dull and pointless that we either turn the anger inward against ourselves (one definition of depression), or feel seized by the impulse to run madly out of the house, down to the river, and search among the bullrushes for a miracle.
Whatever calls we will not name or follow coalesce into entities which will, at every turn, attempt to tunnel their way into consciousness using any rough tool at hand----pickaxes, broken shovels, fingernails----and we’ll be reminded of them by the impeccable logic of pain. As an old Roman saying goes: The fates lead those who will. Those who won’t they drag.
Furthermore, they’ll keep surfacing until they’re dealt with, coming to form in our lives as what Freud called “repetition compulsions”: the same marital fight over and over, the symptom that recurs, the fantasy that won’t go away, drawing to yourself the same type of partner, being fired again.
In the Bible, God often called to the prophets by repeating their names twice. “Abraham, Abraham.” “Jacob, Jacob.” “Moses, Moses.” Once, it seems, wasn’t enough. Indeed, repetition is fundamental to learning. Ask teachers, ask advertisers, ask parents. Perhaps because “still, small voices” aren’t generally of enough voltage to rattle the status quo, they come with staying power. I have, for instance, dreamed of a certain house in New York for over 30 years, ever since my parents’ divorce and my mother’s remarriage----my mind still working it out, my soul still unresolved.
Those who refuse their calls, though, who are afraid to become what they perhaps already are----unhappy----will not, of course, experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually accompanies a full-on calling. Having attempted nothing, they haven’t failed, and they can console themselves that if none of their dreams come true, then at least neither will their nightmares.
Generally, people won’t pursue their callings until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, but it’s appalling how high a threshold people have for this quality of pain. Too many of us, it seems, have cultivated the ability to live with the unacceptable, and it is my hope that this book will make a convincing case for the benefits of allowing ourselves to get shaken up, to trade some of our stagnating certainties and securities for the generative effect of a little friction.
VIRGINS AND VOLCANOES
