Loring, a Writing Life

13: About Calling

So my India book was rejected by 20-some publishers who otherwise had nice things to say about it. I put it aside for the time being. Maybe I’d revise it some day. Maybe I wouldn’t. But I couldn’t let the rocking chair that I sat in to read and write stay empty. In retrospect, the beginning theme of my self-directed M. A. program got worked out sitting in that rocker. How in tarnation, I asked myself, had I come to this spot in my life?

Many years before the years I’m writing about, I was saved by a teacher. When I entered fifth grade I was reading at about a first or second grade level. My teacher, Mrs. Brandt, must have looked at me and seen something salvageable because she took me aside every day and got me reading at an eighth or ninth grade level by the end of the school year. She changed my life.

I tell that story in considerably greater detail when I am asked to give teacher talks, and it always chokes me up. People who repeat the old saw “Those who can’t do teach” infuriate me. For some reason, they choose to ignore what teachers actually do. The vast majority of the teachers I’ve worked with in my years of visiting schools have been caring, conscientious, hard-working people who are actually good at what they do. And for the most part, they have a calling to do what they do.

Which brings me to the crisis of having my India book rejected by all those publishers. The experience, along with the other pressures I’ve mentioned in previous posts, sent me off looking to be a therapist. The director of that program saw me differently, though, and introduced me to the Human Development program director, to whom I spilled my tale of woe. This was good luck, and I got right to work. Because what brought me to the graduate school was a career crisis, I set to work designing a program that would make me a career counselor. Sounds a little like the juvenile delinquent becoming a police officer, tight? Anyway, this began a three-year journey of evening and weekend classes scheduled around paying the bills by visiting schools and teaching classes at Metro State.      

It was a little confusing, and the more I looked at career counselling the less I liked it. It seemed to me that most of what they did boiled down to administering a battery of “instruments,” a fancy word for tests, measuring a client’s strengths and weaknesses and psychological needs and wants and then matching that data up with various fields. The pressure to get people into the highest paying job for which they were qualified bothered me, too. Yes, people have mortgages, children to feed, light bills. I get it. But the enterprise struck me as all-too materialistic. Maybe I’m doing an injustice to the profession, but that was my impression and it left me with a flat, ho-hum feeling. Not my cup of tea.  

But then a light went on in my head one afternoon in my apartment listening to public radio. A highly successful career counselor had written a book. His subject was calling, the message to do in life what my mother would have described as doing “what we were put here on Earth to do.” She always used to say “God has a plan for all of us.” So calling, in my understanding, means doing work that connects your spirit to something greater than itself. My ears perked up, but I’d turned on the radio late and missed most of the conversation.

I ran out later that day and bought the book…and read it with growing alarm.

Damn.

As with most self-help books, this author built his case around a series of in-depth interviews with clients. (They may have all been men. I don’t recall a woman in the mix.) With one exception, they were all high-achieving professionals who were finding their true callings in retirement. In other words, they were finding their spiritual connection after they’d made their pile. The one exception to this author’s exemplars was a massage therapist in a high-end Santa Fe spa. Frankly, the smugness of this book offended me. I had always subscribed to Thoreau’s dictum that we are rich in proportion to what we can do without, which strikes me as a Buddhist perspective. This author had it backwards. Calling is about making a life. It’s not about “giving back” after you’ve gotten yours, however satisfying that may be to the ego. It’s a sometimes difficult path, not something you fill your leisure years with.    

However much good these well-meaning men might have been doing, I was pretty completely turned off by the nakedly bourgeois bent of “career counseling.” That was good to know and it sent me in a new direction. I did a three-paper thesis, each paper focused on the idea of calling in a person’s life path. The other day I went looking for those papers and couldn’t find them. Lost in my recent move? Probably, but the exercise of designing and redesigning my M. A. program and writing those papers had led me back to myself.

The process uncovered what had been there all along. During the years leading up to my crisis, I had been making stories, both written and told, making art, just as I had as a singer earlier in life, just as I had made pictures even earlier. I had always wanted to make some kind of art. Stories turned out to be my form. And I had, like Mrs. Brandt, been teaching. I taught kids skills that would help them better communicate their ideas and feelings, and those same skills, turned around, could make them better readers. In doing so, I know that my energy and enthusiasm inspired many of those children to become better and more enthusiastic readers and writers of stories, and stories are nothing less than windows to empathy and growth. I felt that I was making a contribution to something greater than myself all along.

My contribution is small, as are my gifts. That is as it is. We take our gifts as a call, and we make of them what we can. If you are meant to do something, if you are awake enough to recognize what you have to contribute, you will experience bliss. Not every day. Not every time. But you will experience bliss as if following the signs along a pathway. Do what you love and the money will follow? Yeah. I think that’s more or less true, although the money may not be as much as you dream of, and the satisfaction of living a more fulfilled, authentic life surely is often a mixed blessing.

 So.

I’d been following my calling all along and had only needed to reconnect with myself. A funny thing happened as soon as I’d finished my M. A. Suddenly I had more schools to visit than ever before. Suddenly I had an offer to write a nonfiction book for a fifth grade audience. Suddenly “Shankar and the Bodhi Tree” was picked up by a magazine in Australia and an old story found its way into an anthology. And suddenly I was feeling a whole lot better.

Alas, that feeling didn’t last long.

But we’ll get to that in a bit.