There may be moments in life when we are so unformed that we need to use values like an exoskeleton to keep us from collapsing. But something is very wrong if such moments recur often in adulthood. Trying to live someone else's life, or to live by an abstract norm, will invariably fail-and may even do great damage. (Location 70)
But if the self seeks not pathology but wholeness, as I believe it does, then the willful pursuit of vocation is an act of violence toward ourselves-violence (Location 74)
Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about-quite apart from what I would like it to be about-or my… (Location 76)
Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear. Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling the who I am. I must listen for the truths and values atthe heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but… (Location 78)
That fact alone makes "listen to your life" difficult counsel to follow. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all… (Location 85)
Verbalizing is not the only way our lives speak, of course. They speak through our actions and reactions, our intuitions and instincts, our feelings and bodily states of being, perhaps more profoundly than through our words. We are like plants, full of tropisms that draw us toward certain experiences and repel us from others. If we can learn to read our own responses to our own experience-a text we are writing… (Location 93)
I do not feel despondent about my mistakes, any more than the poet does, though I grieve the pain they… (Location 101)
The soul is like a wild animal-tough, resilient, savvy, self-sufficient, and yet exceedingly shy. If we want to see a wild animal, the last thing we should do is to go crashing through the woods, shouting for the creature to come out. But if we are willing to walk quietly into the woods and sit silently for an… (Location 106)
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self… (Location 121)
It is a strange gift, this birthright gift of self. Accepting it turns out to be even more demanding than… (Location 126)
She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred son]. Biblical faith calls it the image of… (Location 134)
As young people, we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to… (Location 142)
These self-prophecies, now over forty years old, seem wildly misguided for a person who eventually became a Quaker, a would-be pacifist, a writer, and an activist. Taken literally, they illustrate how early in life we can lose track of who we are. But inspected through the lens of paradox, my desire to become an aviator and an advertiser contain clues to the core of true self that would take many years to emerge: clues, by definition, are coded and must he… (Location 153)
If I go farther back, to an earlier stage of my life, the clues need less deciphering to yield insight into my… (Location 160)
The deepest vocational question is not "What ought I to do with my life?" It is the more elemental and demanding "Who am I? What is my nature?"Everything in the universe has a nature, which means limits as well as potentials, a truth well known by people whowork daily with the things of the world. Making pottery, for example, involves more than telling the clay what to become. The clay presses back on the potter's hands,… (Location 172)
"Faking it" in the service of high values is no virtue and has nothing to do with vocation. It is an ignorant, sometimes arrogant, attempt to override… (Location 179)
True vocation joins self and service, as Frederick Buechner asserts when he defines vocation as "the place where your deep gladness meets the… (Location 182)
Only when I know both seed and system, self and community, can I embody the great commandment to love… (Location 190)
Most of us arrive at a sense of self and vocation only after a long journey through alien lands. But this journey bears no resemblance to the trouble-free "travel packages" sold by thetourism industry. It is more akin to the ancient tradition of pilgrimage-"a transformative… (Location 191)
Treacherous terrain, bad weather, taking a fall, getting lost-challenges of that sort, largely beyond our control, can strip the ego of the illusion that it is in charge… (Location 193)
But before we come to that center, full of light, we must travel in the dark. Darkness is not the whole of the story-every pilgrimage has passages of loveliness and joy-but it is the part of the story most often left untold. When we finally escape the darkness and stumble into the light, it is tempting to tell others… (Location 196)
went to Carleton College in Minnesota, a splendid place where I found new faces to wear-faces more like my own than the ones I donned in high school… (Location 207)
Berkeley in the sixties was, of course, an astounding mix of shadow and light. But contrary to the current myth, many of us were less seduced by the shadow than drawn by the light, coming away from that time and place with a lifelong sense… (Location 213)
My heart wanted to keep teaching, but nay ethics-laced liberally with ego-told me I was supposed to save the city. How could I reconcile… (Location 221)
teaching, I was coming to understand, is my native way of… (Location 227)
After five years of conflict and competition, I burned out. I was too thin-skinned to make a good community organizer-my vocational reach had exceeded my grasp. I had been driven more by the "oughts… (Location 231)
I was disappointed in myself for not being tough enough to take the flak,… (Location 233)
But as pilgrims must discover if they are to complete their quest, we are led to truth by our… (Location 234)
I am white, middle-class, and male-not exactly a leading candidate for a communal life. People like me are raised to live autonomously, not interdependently. I had been trained to compete and win, and I had developed a taste for the prizes. But something in me yearned to experience communion, not competition, and that something… (Location 236)
Founded in 1930, Pendle Hill is a Quaker living-and-learning community of some seventy people whose mission is to offer education about the inner journey, nonviolent social… (Location 240)
But early on in that passage I began to have deep and painful doubts about the trajectory of my vocation. Though I felt called to stay at Pendle Hill, I also feared that I had stepped off the edge of the known… (Location 246)
Family and friends were asking me-and I was asking myself-"Why did you get a Ph.D. if this is what you are going to do? Aren't you squandering your opportunities and gifts?" Under that sort of scrutiny, my vocational decision felt wasteful and ridiculous; what's more, it was terrifying to an egolike mine that… (Location 256)
Vocation at its deepest level is not, "Oh, boy, do I want to go to this strange place where I have to learn a new way to live and where no one, including me, understands what I'm doing." Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone… (Location 260)
If those complaints sound unoriginal, it is only because they are. They were the accepted pieties of Berkeley in the sixties, which-for reasons I now… (Location 272)
