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
Perhaps the main reason that calls are ignored is that, instinctively, we know the price they’ll exact. In order to make good on authenticity, we’re going to have to give up something dear, whether that’s a job, a house, a relationship, a belief, a lifestyle to which we’ve become accustomed, the prestige of being a big fish in any sized pond, security, money, precious time, anger at somebody, or just the pleasures of cynicism.
In recent years, a lot of people have taken as a personal motto and policy-statement Joseph Campbell’s admonition to “follow your bliss,” believing, perhaps, that by doing so their lives will be blissful. Unfortunately, it’s more about following than about bliss. That flat-out truth is that if you follow your bliss you’ll have your bliss, and nothing else is promised. Not that having your “bliss” is a trifle. It’s something grievously few people possess. But all calls lead to some sacrifice (even just that in choosing one option, you close the door on another), and some calls lead to much sacrifice, which may feel anything but blissful.
If you’re unwilling to make sacrifices, though, you can end up losing a great deal more than whatever you might have sacrificed.
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