The Good Life: Calling

Over oysters on a Sunday morning in Manhattan, my friend “C” implores me to read Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling: “you have to look at the idea of a calling and how it relates to the good life and there is no better meditation on having a calling than Kierkegaard’s work” he said. I downed my nice little dry sherry, trembled indeed at the thought of reading Kierkegaard, and agreed with “C” that he was on to something. C’s and my conversation about having a calling put me in mind of an interview I did a few months ago with my friend, the English writer Sarah Moss. Sarah is a successful academic, travel writer and novelist. Her books are fantastic. They’re page turners that are rich with observations and ideas. Her characters are intensely relatable, no matter how far-flung and extreme their circumstances. She creates cauldrons of suspense and emotion, but manages the tension with humor and a deft touch. Which is all to say that if you haven’t yet read them, you should do so forthwith.

Sarah is in the enviable position of having found her calling and it was illuminating, and more than a little inspiring, to get a sense of the experience of having – and yielding to – a calling.

A number of aspects of her experience jumped out at me:

1. When you are driven by a sense of calling, there’s a degree of delight – if not downright wonderment - that you actually get to do the thing you want to do. For Sarah, this feeling started dawning when a friend of hers (“someone who lived in the same post code, who went to the same shops!”) became a successful novelist. Inspired by her friend’s success, Sarah herself made the leap to novelist. In doing so, she closed the gap between the kind of life she wanted and the kind of life she had. Now, research trips, hours in her study, editing galleys…they’re all a reflection that she’s made the mythic real.

2. When one’s doing what one’s called to do, there really is a sense of “rightness” about one’s work. Sarah expressed this as a feeling of engaging in “the real thing”. When I asked her to tell me what she meant by that she hesitated, then said, “The thing that I’m meant to be doing I suppose. The thing that justifies my being here.”

What’s interesting is that Sarah knows that it’s the real thing because she’s willing to give the creative writing whatever it asks. She’s listening to the signals from her own engagement with her work. She puts it this way, “That’s how I know this kind of writing is the real thing for me, where academic writing isn’t. Because with academic writing I just do it and then I want it to go away.  And I can just about drag myself to revisit and redraft if that’s a condition of publication, but I don’t want to. I would much rather write a first draft and then just sort of it despatch it into the ether and never have to look at it again. Where, with what for me is the real writing, the fiction and the travel writing, I’ll go back to it as often as it takes. And I will rewrite it as often as it needs rewriting. There’s a real joy for me in erasing 3,000 words because actually it’s not very good. And being able to recognize that it’s not very good and writing it again better.”

3. The third thing that struck me is that having a calling gives one a sense of having a unique role and voice in the world. For Sarah, this emerges through the experience of pulling together disparate topics and themes into a coherent whole: she the connections others might not. In her experience, it’s a process of discovery. Subjects call to her, and it’s up to her to dwell on them long enough to see the pattern that is, in essence, already there. This is how she describes the experience:

“I was in the Victoria and Albert Museum, kind of vaguely prowling because I was thinking about a late-19^th Century setting for another novel. And I ended up spending the entire afternoon in the Japanese room, which isn’t very big. But I really wanting to read every word about everything in there and look at things properly. And remember them. And then I went off to the library and read about them. And I don’t know why. But they really spoke to me…

"So, last summer, I had a pile of books about nineteenth century Japanese history, more about post-war British psychoanalysis, and quite a lot about Victorian prostitution – and a couple of my colleagues came and looked at these and said to me, “What on earth are you doing?” And I thought, “I don’t really know, but when I’ve done it, I will know.” And I’m beginning to see now why I was reading those three strands of things. And I’m still reading them, still with absolute certainty that something’s going to come together out of them.

"It’s very odd. I mean, honestly, I have no more doubt that something coherent will emerge from this than I doubt the alarm clock will go off at 6:00 o’clock tomorrow morning, or that I’ll have to get breakfast. I’m quite sure it will happen, but I have no idea why, or how, or even really quite when

"It’s seeing a new road in front of you that you didn’t know was there. And not being able to see where it goes, but knowing that you’re going to go along it and find out. “Ah, there it is!  That’s the thing!” The thing you didn’t know you were looking for, but you’ve recognized it now."

4. Following one’s calling requires defiance. This doesn’t necessarily look flamboyant (Virginia Woolf’s retreat to a room of one’s own, Picasso’s many mistresses), but it requires considered negotiation about what the world expects of you based on your identity (“wife”, “mother”, “feminist”) and what you need to do to fulfil your calling. Sarah didn’t make a production of this defiance, but I heard it loud and clear in our conversation.

Just to take one example, she defies the implicit norms of the intellectual feminist because she bakes, knits and even crochets. She acknowledges that sometimes this “feels that a betrayal of feminism. It’s expending energy on my own immediate domestic surroundings, and therefore not on any kind of wider political/intellectual world.” But she does it because it helps with her more “abstract” work, like her writing. It’s also a lesson for her writing, “Even if it’s going wrong, and that’s always a good object lesson as well, at least half of what I make I undo and remake several times along the way because it’s not coming out as planned.”

This is a subtle example of defiance to be sure, but the point is that Sarah reflects on what she needs to do to foster the time, energy and creativity to write.

5. Finally, to live with one’s calling is to live a life of emotional intensity. Throughout our interview, Sarah used words like “scary”, “exhilarating”, “fully alive”, “fun”, and “pleasure” (including the “transgressive pleasure” of creating characters who misbehave, which sounded particularly fun). This isn’t to say it’s easy: Sarah also made multiple references to the sheer labor involved in her work – the research, multiple drafts, dwelling with an idea, integrating different spheres of work and late nights. But, if a key part of the good life is feeling alive, following one’s calling is a good way to get there.

The rise in coaching suggests that many of us are longing to find and live our true passions. We yearn for purpose and to feel that our lives have meaning. Sarah’s experience illustrates that having a calling can be a sure path to this. It also suggests that “callings” themselves emerge from engagement with the world, not from fashionable introspection. In other words, while a lucky few might hear their calling, the rest of us can seek it. We can, to borrow my friend C’s term, take a stance on our being. It’s to be in the world and to understand how you see, hear and feel differently. And to dwell on this and think what it asks you to do.

Fascination

The beach!  It’s a superb symbol of relaxation…sunbathing, margaritas, the smell of suntan lotion (well, sunscreen these days)…etc, etc..  But the beach is something else as well:  as the meeting point of land and water, it’s a strange and fascinating borderland. I grew up by water (lakefront and then oceanfront) and my mother always told me we were “water-people”, which made it sound like its own ethnicity.  I’m not sure whether this predisposed me to like water more than the next person, but it certainly did give me license to be particularly geekily fascinated by the lakes, oceans and seas.  And - to confess – it’s a fascination that just doesn’t get old, and which, re-experienced makes me think about the role of fascination in feeling alive and having a great life.

We’ve just been in Florida, on the wide and turquoise Gulf Coast.  We had pitch-perfect weather and spent every morning at the beach.  The water was warm enough for swimming, and varied between surf just right for bodysurfing en famille, to easy, sparkly tranquility.  The water was teeming with life:  sandpipers zipped up and down with the surf, their long bills poised to dig up clams;  pelicans cruised over the water, hunting fish;  millions of little clams washed up with each roll of the waves, then hastily tried to bury themselves out of site;  muscular dolphins even disported themselves further out.  It was hard to tell whether they were fishing or playing, but they sure seemed to be having a good time.  And all the life we did see conjured the feeling of all the life that was out of sight, deeper in the Gulf.  It was an awesome feeling.  I’ve always loved swimming out into deep water just for that feeling of being one more creature among many in the water.  It’s a dizzy sort of a sensation, to have the bottom of the ocean far beneath one, and unseen life all around one.

In Florida, all that life, all that strange life, was captivating.  My own sense of engagement with the world quickened, and I loved watching my children get absorbed by everything that was going on around them.  I couldn’t keep up with their questions:  Why does the surf keep coming like that?  Are all these different looking shells different species? Do sand dollars have different “pictures” on them or are they always flowers?

Besides making us all want to move to the Gulf (notwithstanding the small issue of hurricane season), the whole experience made me reflect on the nature of fascination itself.  To be fascinated is a distinct form of pleasure.  Usually we’re fascinated by things that are new to us.  We want to explore them, learn about them, see different aspects of them.  We can feel fascinated by people (especially when we’re falling in love!), by circumstances (how did that happen?) and by things (how does that work?).  The natural world is endlessly fascinating because there’s always more to experience and learn.  Whether or not you’re a “water-person”, there’s a lot out there to enchant….  For example, there’s a reason that the heavens have inspired some of the greatest minds in the world, from philosophers to poets to scientists.

The marvelous thing about fascination is that it leads us to be open.  It’s the opposite of cynicism or constraining self-awareness.  When we’re fascinated, we tend to forget ourselves. We turn outwards to the world instead of inward to our own thoughts and feelings.  Fascination connects us to things, because it makes us reach out to learn.  And fascination can make us lose our sense of time…the whole world boils down to the subject that holds our attention.

Unfortunately, I don’t know that I necessarily spend a lot of time being fascinated in day to day life.  Most of the time, I’m too busy doing what I need to do in the world that I know.  And culturally, we sneer a bit at fascination, probably because it implies a willingness to expose a deep interest in something, and to reveal a not-knowing, when we’re somehow always supposed to be clever and to know things.

But I vote for embracing fascination, because it’s fun and it opens one up to the world.  And if I feel too mired in the workaday world to be fascinated, well, maybe it’s something I can cultivate. That sounds a little strange, a bit like tryingto fall in love.  But why not?  Maybe it’s just a question of fanning the fires of an interest, whether it’s the Dark Ages in Europe, the discovery of new planets, or life in Iceland.  Come to think of it, Sarah Moss’s new account of her year in Iceland is coming out soon, and it's bound to be brilliant….

When the Dog Bites

Where do parking tickets fit in the whole idea of being switched-on?  Sprained ankles on the first day of holiday?  Being horrendously late for your child’s school performance? These are all things that have happened to me recently…the normal stuff of life, I dare say (OK, maybe more organized parents wouldn’t have screwed up their daughter’s school performance time).  They’re not difficulties compared to serious illness or real loss, but they’re the kind of thing that can shade a day into grey and make one feel more irritated or guilty than alive and engaged.

I’ve been thinking about this issue on and off for a while, and it came up for me yesterday when I accidentally smashed a beautiful antique plate that belongs to a friend.  I felt sick about it.  You can tell me that people are more important than things and I would agree with you wholeheartedly…but it was still awful.  It seems to me that our actions are portrayals of our feelings, so to break the plate signals indifference and carelessness when in fact I feel anything but.  But accidents happen.

So where does the idea of the beauty of feeling alive fit here?  Is the goal to feel switched-on most of the time, but accept that there will be times when we just feel crummy?  Or do we try to get through the crummy stuff by intentionally doing things that will restore us to feeling alive and uplifted?

The answer is probably both.  One thing I know for sure though is that our “cultural scripts” for moving through hardship tend not to be very useful.  Traditionally, we are encouraged either to be stoic (“suck it up”) or to try to rise above it all by a sheer act of will (“let it go”).  This is the kind of Nietzchean claptrap debunked in All Things Shining.  It’s pervasive though, so much a part of our culture that its heavy hand is invisible.  Think of the lyrics of the song from which I’ve stolen this title, “I simply remember my favourite things, and then I don’t feel so bad.”  It’s a nice idea, and brown paper packages tied up with string are delightful, but you get the underlying message:  you ought to be able to think your way out of anything.

Here’s a different idea: try experiencing your way out of negative feelings.  Yesterday, I was in a funk about having let down my friend by breaking her plate all morning.  Then, around lunchtime, I happened to hear an exquisite piece of music on the radio:  a new recording of Bach’s St. John Passion produced jointly by Les Voix Baroques and the Arion Baroque Orchestra.  It was so beautiful, and somehow so unexpected, that I pulled over by a park and just listened to it.  I didn’t have to will myself to get some perspective, it gave me perspective.

A plate is just a plate, even when it’s antique and beautiful.  My friend will still love me;  I will still love my friend.  I will try to have it fixed, or to find something as elegant and lovely to replace it.  I gain nothing by wallowing in guilt.  Living is something else.  And living is the goal.

Of course, you also have to be able to forgive yourself…for doing something stupid, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or for doing whatever you perceive your transgression to be.  I am extremely gifted at punishing myself, and I recently caught myself trying to instill exactly the same trait in my children.  Now, children need to learn feel remorse (we don’t want to raise little sociopaths) and we all need to be able to express it.  But by the same token, there’s remorse, there’s atonement, and then there’s remembering to live.  Pain and guilt might make you feel alive, in a way, but they’re never uplifting and they’re never gifts to others.  Some experiences pain us, some heal us.  So when the dog bites, don’t just think of your favourite things, go live them.