Comments on: There is no One True Calling

By: Digdug

Digdug — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 17:40:54 +0000

“And that means that what was right five years ago isn’t necessarily right now, and what’s right now isn’t necessarily what will be right five or ten or twenty years down the road.”

So true. I think going back to school was right for me at the time, but now my priorities have shifted, and the dysfunctions of academia just don’t seem worth it. It’s very, very difficult to accept this though.

“Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world.”

On this note, right now I’m volunteering with a local African-centric NGO, doing routine administrative work. While at the office I get to talk to people whose company I genuinely enjoy, unlike the nutty type-As I meet in grad school. So right, now, yes, this place is somewhat of a calling, as my desire to talk to normal people dovetails with the fact that I’m making a small difference in an important organization.

By: Cranky Fibro Girl

Cranky Fibro Girl — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 20:41:15 +0000

I am SO GLAD you wrote this post. I struggled with this for so many years. Now I have gotten to the point in my life where I define sort of the overarching umbrella of all the different things I do as “Free Spirit”, which has been amazingly freeing for me.

By: OnTheRun

OnTheRun — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 18:54:28 +0000

Very nicely put. I am now going through all this and your writings often puts what I feel into accurate words.

– Your website is truly useful for some of us who now struggle…

Its not easy, but to all those out there that are currently escaping the tower I should say that it becomes significantly better once you get out of the closet within your close environment. When you tell your colleagues and mentors of your extra-academic plans you will find that some will be sympathetic, some will be supportive, some will be angry, and some will be jealous. Honestly I found, however, that most people don’t care, and just go on with their life.

Most importantly, your friends/partners/family will stand by you and, if they do, they will judge you by who you are and not by the (often hypocritical) standards in the world you wish to leave behind.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 15:56:28 +0000

Very apropos to me right now. I think one reason I want something a bit more from my job is that it does take the best hours of my day and so I’d like to think that those hours are going to a good purpose.

As you counseled in the teleclass last night, that’s an assumption I have that I should examine and question. Maybe a job that takes less time during the week would enable me to use my best hours where I’d prefer to use them. (I just ran into the guy who dropped out of our cohort last semester and he looked much happier.)

I have a brilliant friend, a novelist, who has a rich life away from work, but his day job has hospitalized him for stress and, as he put it, if the job involved heavy machinery he’d have lost several fingers by now. He’d love to write full-time, but his novels’ sales do not provide a means to do that.