How does your job fit into your life? More importantly, how do you want your job to fit into your life?

When we’re stressing out about our place in academia, whether it’s the identity-based stressed of “what do I want” or the logistical stress of “how do I get a job I want / how do I make this job work,” it’s really really easy to let everything else slide until that’s the only thing we’re thinking about, talking about, or engaging.

And then the trouble really starts.

All the other pieces

Lots of things go into a healthy, whole life — primary relationships, family, friends, hobbies, spirituality, community. If you sat down and listed out all the things that are important to you, I’m sure your career would come up, but I’m equally sure it would be one thing among others.

When one part of our lives is feeling off the rails, it’s tempting to believe that if we could only figure that one out, if we could only get it right, then we’d be happy. Then we’d be satisfied. Then we’d be comfortable and pleasant and fulfilled.

Honestly, the mono-focus of academia only exacerbates this tendency. How many academics do you know who have few interests outside their jobs, few friends outside their colleagues, few activities that don’t involve campus?

But however distressing any one part of our lives is, it’s the whole that matters. And while our careers and jobs are incredibly important to our whole lives, so are many other things.

Put it in context

You are more than an academic. Really.

Go ahead — write down all of the other roles you’re actively fulfilling these days: parent, partner, rock climber, flautist, beer snob, gardener, yogi, fountain-pen enthusiast, chicken farmer, writing group participant, marathoner, family member, volunteer, mentor.

What have you done for them lately?

Blend, baby, blend

The ruling metaphor of the late 20th-century life was “balance” — all those images of fitting it all in at once, having it all, finding that point at which everything fit.

You know what? There’s too much room for failure and too little room for success in that metaphor. Get caught up in a project, and whoops! There goes the balance. Have a life crisis? Whoops! There goes the balance.

“Blend,” on the other hand, allows for more than two things at once. “Blend” suggests that you’re cooking up something fantastic. “Blend” is about more than a single point in time, so you’re not looking at this moment, you’re looking at the composition of a week, a month, a season, a year.

Keeping struggles within the big picture

I bring all of this up because when I talk to clients, I see how easy it is for them to slip into an obsessive focus on whatever piece they’re trying to figure out right now. Everything is about the job search, everything is about figuring out whether they want to stay in academia, everything is about dissecting this job that’s driving them batty.

That means they never rest. That means they aren’t being able to lean into any other part of their life that is working and gain strength and confidence from it. That means they’re focused only on the thing that isn’t working, that’s hard and challenging.

That means they’re fucking exhausted.

I don’t know about you, but I make really crappy decisions when I’m exhausted. When I’m exhausted, I make decisions just so I can be done and I can stop making a decision already, because I’m too burnt out to be able to continue. That’s not exactly the way to a well-chosen life.

So if you’re in that space, make a conscious effort to bring back into your lived experience all those other things that are important. Go hike in the mountains. Go stare at pretty paintings in the museum. Go dancing. Go to coffee with your best friend and critique all the outfits that come in the door. Go read something entirely mindless and unenlightened. Go wrestle the dog. Go on a date with your partner. Go color with your kid. Go catch up on all of the blog posts and forum posts for that beloved hobby you’ve been neglecting.

In short, take a break. Blend the rest of your life back in. You’ll come back energized and more clear-headed and more creative and more optimistic.

Really.

We have a lot of baggage around the idea of a calling, we people of this century.

Sometimes, the whole enterprise seems, well, self-indulgent and stupid. My mother’s father, for example, wouldn’t have recognized the question. He fought in WWII and sent money home to his family, he worked in the quarry, he volunteered at the fire department and the police station and the water station, he raised three girls with a wife he loved, and when they retired, he dragged my grandmother all over the country on special elder-tours. By all accounts he was satisfied with, even pleased with, his life, without ever engaging the idea that he needed to live out a special mission.

Sometimes people take it too far. I’ve watched more than one college near-graduate refuse to take a job on the grounds that it wasn’t inherently fulfilling to them, blithely neglecting to remember that the only way that works is if someone else, who isn’t necessarily thrilled with every moment of their job, either, subsidizes the project. (I suspect this is rarer now than it once was, the economy being what it is.)

And sometimes it sounds just a bit too religious for our intellectual, post-humanist selves.

Most of us, however, end up somewhere in the middle — longing for a sense of meaning, connection, and purpose while simultaneously not being convinced that anything we’re running up against is It.

It’s like we believe that what we need to do is just find our (avocational) soulmate, and then everything will be fine, everything will unfold after that, but this avocation has a bad sense of humor, and that one is too uptight about money.

This is why leaving academia can feel like divorce, right down to the question of who keeps which friends. We found our One True Love, but what happens when the shine is off that particular rose? Does that mean we’ve failed? Does that mean we’re doomed to marginal happiness ever after?

Just like there’s probably not one person in the whole world who will automatically make you happy forever, there’s no one calling that will make you happy forever. Rather, there’s no simple conception of your calling that will make you happy forever.

Your calling, just like your marriage, your relationships, your life, and you yourself, is always growing and evolving. You’re always learning more about it. New possibilities are always opening up. 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.

Because so many of us experienced our fields and our work as a calling, it can be brutally troubling to run up against dissatisfaction. Because we felt called to academia, realizing that call is no longer there is painful.

I don’t want to suggest that those losses shouldn’t be mourned if you’re experiencing grief. I do want to suggest that you open up your conception of yourself to see what you’re being called to now.

Parker Palmer talks about your calling as the place where your deepest desires meet the needs of the world. In other words, while there are any number of things you’re probably good at, and while there are infinite problems in the world to solve, the particular configuration of your heart and this moment illuminate what you’re being called to now.

What are you being called to now? How well does that calling work within the structures of academia?