The Value of a Sense of Calling

I have been on the road for a few days on a business related trip to Bowling Green, Kentucky. Being quite busy, and fairly immersed in what I was doing, I did not have any burning topics in my soul for yesterday or even this morning.

The weather was perfect the past two days. Mid-seventies, sunny skies. Kentucky is truly beautiful in the spring. The green grass and white fences make for some wonderful scenes and I think of the song "My Old Kentucky Home" because my father's roots are here in Kentucky.

This morning there's an overcast sky and a grey misty quality that brings to mind an early poem of mine titled Wisconsin Misty Morning, written during a week's vacation to a finger lake in central Wisconsin when I was wrestling with my life direction in 1983. The poem begins with something of a deep groan from my soul, a prayer to have the fog lifted from my life path. "Wisconsin misty morning come redeem me from this drifting, like the fog that here is lifting..."

And then it happened. I had a sense of calling to be a writer. Or rather, the fog lifted that week and I realized I had always been a writer, and that if I followed this particular star it would lead somewhere. I would fulfill my destiny, wherever and in whatever form that took.

To some extent this is what Joseph Campbell meant when he said "Follow your bliss." I had aways been a creative person, but had locked myself into believing this creative flow had to be expressed in the visual arts. But creativity is much bigger than that. It can be in architecture, engineering, applied sciences, philosophy, even economics as demonstrated in the Russell Crowe film A Beautiful Mind.

There is something quite powerful in knowing you're doing what you were destined to do or using the gifts that are innately, and even uniquely, yours. If you haven't got a passion worth hitching your life to, then maybe your first quest should be to get to know yourself. Who are you?

Take your time, though. You can't force it. This sense of calling has to come from within. And don't be afraid to dream.