“When my daughter was seven years old,” says artist Howard Ikemoto, “she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college, that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared back at me, incredulous, and said, ‘You mean they forget?’ ”
Yes, we forget. And this book is also about remembering our vocations, again in the true sense of the word----callings----whether they’re vocations in the arenas of work, relationship, lifestyle or service. They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school, leave or start a relationship, move to the country, change careers, have a child) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls toward something or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in an entirely new way; calls toward whatever we’ve dared and double-dared ourselves about for as long as we can remember.
CENTRIFUGAL FORCE
Unfortunately, rather than confront and act on the longings we feel, and the conniptions of change that usually ensue, we often simply tune out, denial generally being the endorphin of choice. Perhaps it’s not, after all, that we really forget our calls, but that the fear of what might be demanded of us in pursuing them blocks us from acknowledging that we do know, and have always known. Perhaps we fear not just what will be required of us, but fear the hope that such calls evoke in us, and the power we know is dammed up behind our resistance.
A multitude of forces in this world certainly conspire to divide us against ourselves, our power and authenticity, our voices, even our ability simply to listen to ourselves and believe what we hear: parents who either told us or modelled for us that dreams aren’t bankable; schooling that braided into our minds the message that we must live up to certain standards, but seldom do; the wheedlings of adversiting and consumerism; a patriarchal culture that taught us----by the brute force of Reason----to abandon our instincts and intuitions; the juggernaut of conformity, without which culture couldn’t exist, but that exacts from us in return a stiff price in individuality; and even the instinct for survival.
“Nature places a simply constraint on those who leave the flock to go their own way,” say the authors of Art and Fear. “The get eaten! In society, it’s a bit more complicated, but the admonition stands: avoiding the unknown has considerable survival value. Society and nature.....tend to produce guarded creatures.” The upshot is that we often end up trading our authenticity for what we perceive as survival, terrified to swap security for our heart’s deep desires, which is the imperative of all callings and one of the dominant fears in responding to them.
Saying yes to the calls tends to place us on a path that half of us thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows our lives won’t make sense without. This latter part, continually pushing out from within us with centrifugal force, keeps driving us toward authenticity, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, against terrific odds, and against the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour.
We find ourselves compelled to follow the sometimes blind spiritual instinct that tells us our lives have purpose and meaning, and that we must act on this imperative despite the temptations----to back down and run for cover----that will divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves. We must persist with the sort of hope of which the playwright and former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel spoke when he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”
This requires a cussed determination to prevail, especially in the face of a bewildering paradox that lies at the heart of each of our calls and each of our lives: both are incredibly important and incredibly insignificant all at once. Our lives are like giant earthquakes: in geologic terms, muscle twitches; in human terms, titanic. Knowing such a thing, we can’t help but approach the prospect of following our deepest callings with anything but exhilaration and terror.
THE VEIL IN THE TEMPLE
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