Callings And Shoutings
by Gregg Levoy

Editor’s Note: Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life—a selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Quality Paperback Books and the One Spirit Book Club—has written about callings for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Psychology Today, and others. A full-time speaker and seminar leader in the business, educational and human-potential arenas, he travels extensively offering callings workshops and lectures. His website is www.gregglevoy.com.

There is a scene in an old Woody Allen movie called, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex in which a couple are about to make love for the first time when the man is suddenly struck with impotence. The camera takes us inside his head where two burly security guards come bursting through the doors of Command Central in the brain dragging a half-crazed priest who is shouting biblical injunctions and damnations about premarital sex. They tell their commanding officer that they found him hiding out in the subconscious.

The point is it is hard to perform when you have voices shouting mutinies inside your head, cross-examining the fundamental values and premises of what you’ve built—your career, your sense of mission, your clarity about whether you want to grow your practice, maintain it, scale it back or quit it altogether. Voices that undermine your resolve, undo your best-laid plans and make sure that the only law you end up practicing with any efficiency is Murphy’s law.

In addition the lawyering profession creates a number of unusual pressures: the antagonistic nature of it, its less-than-sterling reputation, ferocious competition, groaning case loads, skyrocketing billable-hour quotas and the age old conflict between law and commerce that goes back to a time when lawyers wore tunics instead of ties. The fear that “doing business,” to say nothing of advertising, will sully one’s professional dignity and rupture a hole in the cherished doctrine, integral to the legal identity, that justice cannot be bought or sold despite the fact that attorneys can be found in the Yellow Pages after appliances and before auction houses and automobiles.

Among these shouting voices are the callings that issue from your own soul, that spiritual organ you carry with you every day that observes and informs every move you make. It tells you whether you are in integrity with your deepest self, or not, and what it will take to make your life literally “come true.” There is no ignoring its demands with impunity. It is capable of meting out punishments as real as any that could be meted out by a boss—including depression, insomnia, anger and frustration at your own inertia, envy at other people’s successes and a feeling of being out of whack with yourself.

The ancient Romans used to say that the Fates lead those who will and those who won’t they drag. It is no coincidence that the American Medical Association discovered some years back that the majority of heart attacks occur around 9am on Mondays, which undoubtedly has something to do with what most of us are doing around 9am on Mondays—going back to work or, more precisely, going back to work we don’t like or, if it doesn’t match our spirits, work that can literally break your heart.

In this sense money costs too much. The price people are willing to pay to have it is way too steep. It is tragically easy to build yourself a velvet cage: the money is great, the perks enviable (so what if the only reason you’re using your medical benefits is that your job is making you sick), the surroundings familiar and the security comforting. But you end up becoming, at best, a recreational user of your passion and creativity. You lose. Your company loses. The world loses.

The soul is the ultimate BS-detector. It is the part of you who absolutely knows what it knows, knows the feeling of integrity in your life and the feel of its absence. It knows the bigger picture of your life, the blueprint against which all your actions are compared.

The callings that emanate from the soul or spirit are living entities with animus all of their own. They exert a centrifugal force on your life, continually pushing out from within, driving you towards authenticity and aliveness, against the tyranny of fear, inertia and, occasionally, reason. They are metered by the knocking in your heart that signals the hour. If you are at all faithful to your calls, to the driving force of the soul in your life, they’ll lead you to points of decision, sometimes with nauseating regularity. Here you must decide whether to say yes or no, now or later, ready or not. They will keep coming back until you give them an answer. Do you leave your job or stay, take a sabbatical and come back in a new way, take on a new role or let go of an old one, make a creative leap or career change, launch a new venture or style of leadership, make a course-correction in your life or work?

Saying yes to a call tends to place you on a path that half of you thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won’t make sense without. You find yourself following the blind spiritual instinct that tells you that your life has purpose and meaning, that this calling is part of it, and that you must act on it despite the temptations to back down and run for cover that will divide even the most grimly resolute. It sometimes involves the pick-and-shovel work of aligning or re-aligning with your passion and sense of purpose, with the deep values rather than the advertised values and with a fit between who you are and what you do, which is among the best kinds of success.

Of course most people won’t follow a calling until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so—pain that we appear to have an appallingly high threshold for. Eventually the prospect of emotional and financial turmoil, the disapproval of others and the various conniptions of change, can begin to seem preferable to the psychological death you are experiencing by staying put. At that point it pays to follow a bit of cowboy wisdom: when your horse dies, get off!

Those who refuse their passions and purposes in life, though, who are afraid of becoming what they perhaps already are—unhappy—won’t of course experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually accompanies the embrace of a calling. Having attempted nothing, they haven’t failed, and they console themselves that if none of their dreams come true then at least neither will their nightmares.

The rub is that the human psyche is like the Earth. It is a closed system. There is no “out” as in, “throwing the garbage out.” There is no trash icon. Whatever energies you ignore or repress will come up somewhere else and, at the very least, in your dreams and fantasies, possibly in your body and spirit as symptoms. The frustrations and regrets in your life become like tombstones reminding you where someone is buried.

As for the work of aligning with calls, consider this: I used to do a lot of stone sculpting and to learn whether a stone is “true,” it is banged with a hammer. If it gives off a dull tone it means the stone has faults running throughout that will crack it apart when worked upon. If it gives off a clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, it means the stone is true, has integrity and, most importantly, will hold up under repeated blows.

That is precisely the information you want about your visions, ventures and callings. You want to know they ring true, have integrity and, most importantly, will hold up under repeated blows—the kind the world specializes in. Among the best ways to determine this is to tap it repeatedly and listen. Turn all receivers to the ON position and take time to listen to your callings with what St. Benedict calls the ear of the heart. Remember that it may require of you patience on the order of years.

Work is merely one of the arenas in which you play the game—the one the Gods are watching from their press-box atop Mt. Olympus while sipping mint juleps. It is only one of the arenas in which you express your humanity, search for meaning, play out your destiny and dreams, contribute your energies and gifts to the world and spend your precious nick of time. It is also an arena in which you spend two-thirds of your waking lifetime and it is legitimate to love your work! Life is a thousand times too short to bore yourself. If someday your life does flash in front of your eyes, the very least you want it to do is hold your interest.