Career or Calling?

The word ‘career’ comes from the French word carrière, which is the same root of the word carry, such as luggage – something you carry around with you. Is that what your occupation is?

The word ‘calling’ comes from a late Old English word ceallian, and from Old Norse kalla meaning ‘summon loudly’. Do you have important passions in your life that have this affect on you?  

Which one of these seems to be a more powerful force to tap into?

If the only thing keeping you going is a sort of Machiavellian notion of conquest, a chess game where you are maneuvering yourself, a logistics operations where you are advancing your lot in life from one place to another, you may be missing out on a greater potential and a greater energy within yourself to do more, have a greater impact, and really align yourself with your gifts and talents.

Not everybody is so blessed to know exactly what they want to do when they are children or teenagers. It certainly makes things more simple and clear-cut if you do. But everybody has natural gifts, unique value, and offerings they can create that nobody else can.

There is a little subtle energy that exists within living things, and certainly, you could say, within humans, which is called: Instinct, or intuition, or that gut feeling.

Every time you get into grief or regrets in your path, just ask yourself, ‘Were you following your instincts?’ Many times, when this happens, I wager that you were going against some greater instinct that was (subtly) warning you to run in a certain direction, or walk away from a bad relationship, or take a once-in-a-lifetime risk.

I hope you will be so lucky as to follow the ‘loud summoning’, or your calling(s) in life, as opposed to just playing vocational leap-frog to arrive at some perceived level of comfort and status. There are some wonderful doors that may open up for you when you start to tap into that flow, and I hope that you will now or someday know what I am talking about.

Yrs. truly,

Dave