In one of her meditations the wonderful Sarah Ban Breathnach invites us to consider the difference between a job, a career and a calling. As in so many things, I am one of the lucky ones. I have had the joy of experiencing all three. Each can be a joy. Sara’s original musing suggests that while all have their place, only the true calling with bring us fulfilment. I don’t agree. If that were so, we’d have to resign ourselves to too much of life feeling un-fulfilled. Maybe we do that anyway, but we don’t have to.
Being fulfilled is what we’re all after – that sense of total satisfaction with our lot: that we have enough, do enough, simply ARE enough. I shy away from the noun fulfilment because it suggests an outcome, a point of arrival, some mythical place where we set down our load, heave a sigh of relief, and say “Yep. Job Done.” But then what? Unless we do that just as we breathe our last, there is likely to be a lot of ‘what, then’ still to come. If we are fulfilled, do we just rest on our laurels for the rest of our days?
Wreaths of greenery are beautiful things, but they have a tendency to be prickly, spiky, and sticky: they have always struck me as being somewhat uncomfortable bedfellows.
I am intuitively wary of the idea of stopping. Resting, yes. Pausing, definitely. Changing course, whenever necessary. But coming to a complete standstill doesn’t appeal. Nature never stops. She keeps moving, changing, growing, retreating, colliding and breaking sometimes, fusing and creating at others, but always in motion: imperceptibly or dramatically, but always in the process of becoming more, or less, or different. The very planet shifts beneath our feet – externally moving through space and also internally as the plates shift; magma streams, builds pressure, blows; water boils, steams, condenses, flows beneath the ground as well as above it. Systems, processes, freak events, change.
We are part of nature, much as we tend or try to forget that. We are natural beings. We are part of the overall system. To fulfil our function within that system we too must move both externally (in the world) and internally (in our selves). We too shift, grow, retreat, change, collide, merge, diverge, break, create – we cannot help but do so.
We won’t always be in control of it the direction of change. At times we will less collide than be collided with; we will be knocked off course, or we may stray of our own volition, tempted, transported, tricked. That may not always be a bad thing. Cruelty being sometimes kindness disguised. Clouds and silver linings.
Being fulfilled, I believe, comes from accepting this function, and bringing our gifts to bear upon it.
Being fulfilled is a continuing process, we are fulfilled (refilled, refuelled) in the same degree as we allow outflow, putting our self, our gifts, our work into the wild.
I don’t believe that we can be fulfilled only when we have found our purpose in life and lived up to its claim upon us, because ‘purpose’ is not a simple thing. Purpose is not necessarily a pre-ordained thing: sometimes maybe, but mostly I think we find or create our own. Our life has meaning to the extent that we choose to give it some.
There are some among us who were clearly born to a purpose. They know from a very early age what their life is to be and everything is bent towards making it so. They know the path and if they are forced to waver from it, they return as soon as they can. I just always knew they say, when asked to explain.
If you’re not one of them, welcome to the rest of the world. Most of us aren’t. I have no idea what the numbers are but I would guess that percentage-wise, the ones who just always knew are in single figures.
Most of us fall in one of the other camps. It may be that we are not born to a single purpose, but to multiple ones which we fulfil and, crucially which fulfil us, either simultaneously or sequentially.
Or we may be born to a single purpose but have to walk a convoluted road before it is revealed to us…perhaps we have to experiment in order to find it, or perhaps we simply need to wait for it to become clear, living out our ordinary lives in the meantime. Maybe those ordinary lives are necessary preparation, apprenticeships, for what we are here to do. Or maybe they simply keep us occupied until the time is right for us to step into the spotlight.
Or maybe that ordinary life is exactly the way we have been called to serve. There are only so-many spotlights to step into. Maybe we have to create our own and shine it on our life just as it is and say: Hey! This also counts. This is enough! No, this isn’t just enough, this right here, what I’m doing today, is amazing!
We are born with two instructions that most of us never bother to read. The first one says, “find your own meaning”. The second one says, “you are allowed to change your mind”.
What if we haven’t found it yet? Does this mean that we must remain unfulfilled while we are apprenticing or searching or waiting?
I don’t think so.
Which brings me back to this notion of Job, Career, or Calling and how each of them can bring you joy – not only the true calling, which I have been describing as ‘purpose’ or ‘meaning’. I’m going to talk about my experience of job, career and calling. It sounds like a progression, but only because that is how my life turned out. There is no reason it should be so. You are free to jump in, or stop at, any point along the way.
IT’S JUST A JOB
For the first twenty years of my working life, I was very clear that what I had was “just a job”. I showed up on time and worked extremely hard at getting the work done. I took pride in doing the best that I could…and I took it very personally when I failed. I worked long days and many weekends. I never felt fully appreciated for either the effort or the results. At one stage I was demoted – anyone who has been through a staff “restructuring” knows how that feels. I sulked. I stropped. I then concocted a plan, which didn’t work out the way I’d hoped, but it did get me a better (more fulfilling) role and allowed me to work with someone I’d been waiting to work more closely with for a long time. But it was still “just a job”. I was very clear that the work was to earn the money to pay for the other stuff. The other stuff in question was, mostly, travelling.
Travelling to some amazing places, with some amazing people or sometimes simply on my own. I was finally getting to see the world. This was ‘what I’d always wanted to do’. The travel thing. The walking thing. The learning about the sites and sights and sounds and smells and tastes of strange places. The being among strangers. I suspect that one of the things I love about travelling is the anonymity of it…the not having to be anyone. Being in a strange place can often enable you to background yourself, and just watch. Look and learn.
Obviously, it doesn’t always work out that way. There are dangers and unhelpful weather and not all strangers are unmet friends and it is tiring and I’m grumpy when I’m tired and whilst some of the “worst” hotels and lodges have been my favourite places to spend afternoons, evenings and nights – not all of them – and equally some of the “best” hotels have left me bored, sleep-deprived and morose, and again: not all of them. Context is everything and we are always part of our own context. What we expect of a place, plays heavily into what we find there.
But these are musings for another time. The point is: I worked hard at the job, not because it was expected of me, but because “doing my best” makes me feel good. Knowing I had grafted, gave me my own permission to switch off completely when I left home in the middle of the night to get on a bus, a train, a plane. I took satisfaction in doing the work well, because that was part of the fulfilment – the fruits of my labour, the money to fund the next trip, that was the other part.
I believe that “just a job” will only bring you joy if you allow it to do so. Doing the best that I can is a hard-wired part of who I am. I had a job that played to my core skills and to my curiosity. I was fortunate in my line managers and while I generally felt under-appreciated by the firm, I knew that my immediate managers had my back and fought my corner. That mattered. To derive joy from something which is ‘just a job’ I believe one of two circumstances has to prevail.
EITHER the job is something that you can enjoy the doing of, regardless – which means it must play to your skills, be sufficiently challenging to engage either your body or your brain or both to allow occasional moments of flow, and be in a field of operations that you don’t ethically object to. The other part of my luck was that my job eased my social conscience. The work we were all doing was important and necessary.
OR your reason for doing it (be that family or creativity or exploration or something else again) your passion must be so all-consuming that you will quite simply do whatever it takes, no matter how mind-numbingly tedious or bone-wearyingly arduous, because you can get through the days focussed on the point of it all, you can rejoice that every day is a day survived and/or a day closer to the goal.
In other words, you can find joy in the doing it, or in the having done it. These are both fulfilling in their way.
THE CAREER
The next ten years of my working life saw me ‘switch lanes’. I stayed with the firm but moved into difference work-stream. I landed myself another brilliant boss, but this time one who was willing to fight my corner while pushing me out of it. I will never be able to thank him enough.
I got qualified, and better qualified. I got promoted. I’m told I got respected. I know I got better paid.
I was still working stupid hours, but this time it wasn’t just to pay the bills and go hiking. This time it morphed into a fully-fledged career. I cared not only about doing the job well, but about where doing it well would lead me. I cared about helping others in the discipline. I found myself leading a team, and working on committees, and trying to inspire others to use the opportunities we had.
I have always flinched when someone tells me they are passionate about their role / job / work-area, because I never was. In retrospect, I think I might have been. I just didn’t recognise it.
For someone with no passion for the career, I put myself through no end of stressful situations to further it. For a whole decade, I lived my life entirely outside of my comfort zone. I may still be paying the price for some of that, but I did it freely. I did it because the successes delighted me. I did it because some of the opportunities excited me. I did it because I loved the intellectual challenges. I did it because…because…because…
Because it was a joy more often than it was a trauma.
People who worked with me during that period might not recognise that interpretation.
Most people would have seen more of the stress than they did of the pleasure. Simply put I would not have sat up writing reports and briefing notes and contracts and procedure guides and meeting minutes at midnight if I wasn’t totally in ‘flow’. I would not have stressed about exams that I probably didn’t really need to be sitting if it wasn’t just me “doing the best I can” and indulging my skill set and my curiosity. My masters’ degree was directly related to my career, but I think only one person in the room understood when I said I was doing it for fun.
To derive joy from a career, you have to want to do it for its own sake. Careers are hard task-masters. If you want to ‘progress’ (whatever that means in your field) you have to want it and you have to enjoy the doing of it. You cannot rely on enjoying the ‘having done it’ as you can with a job – because you will not get that reward. A career will eat up huge portions of your life. You will, willingly or otherwise, wittingly or otherwise, sacrifice time and opportunity, neither of which will come again. A career is not some that gets you something else. What a career gets you is a career.
It might also make you a lot of money, but it will eat into the time you have to enjoy it. During those ten years I travelled a lot less. For several of them, I didn’t travel at all.
I don’t regret it.
THE CALLING
I have much less to say about the calling because I am still listening to it, trying to understand the nuances of it. I know that I am answering, I know that I am beginning to do what I was always meant to do to, which is to write. Put words down on paper or on screen and release them into the wild in the hope that they may entertain or inspire or ease or simply distract for a while.
I am that stage of answering the call, where my answers are really questions: what am I supposed to do, what do you want of me, where will these words lead, which words, in what form, and how good do I have to be for this to work and will I ever get there and – most importantly – do I have it in me?
A very long time ago, I watched someone achieving their version of success and I remember saying “Yes, but I never want to work that hard.” I still don’t. The difference is that I now know that it’s not hard work, when it is what you are meant to do.
I am a great believer in the assertion that you always have a choice, but I’m learning is that sometimes, for all the right reasons, it feels like you don’t, because the one you are making – however hard in the moment – you know in your heart is the right one.
It is the right choice because you are doing what you were born to do (whether you knew it or not), or because it is a career that gives you the money or the power or the job-satisfaction that you crave, or because it is a just a job that pays the bills, keeps the wolf from the door, and allows you to indulge the fantasies…which might just be a quiet ‘calling’ that you should really be listening to.
I used to be very good at my job. My career served me well, and I climbed the ladder, and hopefully influenced a few things for the better. I know that I inspired a few people because they told me so. I know I helped a few people because they thanked me. And I know that the work itself was important.
I also know that it is not what I was put on this earth to do. This is.
