More than just a job or occupation, a calling is a feeling of being beckoned to draw on your abilities. Just as we each have a unique biological fingerprint, we each have a distinctive combination of talents and gifts. In our individual uniqueness, we contribute meaningfully to the lives of others as a matter of destiny and integrity.

Callings can be simple or complex, but they are all worthy of equal regard and respect. To have a calling feels so purposeful that many people follow it through thick and thin. With meaning, the sky is the limit. A true calling is a noble purpose for which we feel well-suited and able to express ourselves as free, loving, and creative beings. Each of us has multiple callings throughout life. They can change, stay the same, or happen simultaneously. For instance, Mahatma Gandhi was simultaneously a spiritual practitioner, social activist, writer, and weaver. Callings can be consuming. It was not easy for Gandhi to be an attentive husband and father at the same time. Finding balance in life is everyone’s challenge, and finding perfect balance is probably impossible.

Following callings—whether a gradual, well-mentored development or a singularly unexpected experience or a combination of these—is not always easy. A calling can feel invasive, breaking into our otherwise routine “good enough” lives and disrupting us to a higher consciousness of who we are meant to be. It often means taking the road less traveled, a road filled with adversity and challenges. But if you love what you are doing and feel called to it for the sake of love, then you will find inner peace. You will never consider straying.

PERSEVERANCE REQUIRED

Callings often involve hardships and adversity of all kinds, and you may experience rejection. But following a calling is not about popularity. It requires perseverance. Any so-called “success” in life that contradicts your core values and dreams is not real success, and it will leave you running on empty, just going through the external motions. It is easy to be seduced by more money or by working in a prestigious institution that takes you away from your dreams.

You may be broke at times, as I was while pursuing my doctorate at the University of Chicago. I could have left and done something more lucrative at the time, which would have been logical since we had a baby on the way, but I took jobs in restaurants around the university and even sold flowers down in the Loop sometimes. My first teaching job at the University of Detroit-Mercy paid $15,500 per year, but that felt acceptable because I was working with mostly disadvantaged youth who needed a lot of help, and I was teaching them about the wheel of love. The feeling of calling was my compensation. Nothing came easy, but we were still at inner peace. Callings require us to keep the light burning bright no matter how strong the wind is blowing.

Callings can bring times of adversity and rejection, but I like to look at life as an artist’s expanding canvas. I love Jackson Pollock’s art because he began many of his masterpieces by throwing down an unattractive gob of dark paint on the canvas covering the floor of his studio-barn. But he expanded from that point with magnificent colors and lines that seemed to capture the energy of the universe and form a spiritual masterpiece. Callings are not always convenient, but heeding your callings leads to a richer, fuller, more colorful life than would otherwise be the case. In this life there will be many times when we each have to expand the canvas with the energy of pure, unlimited love.

There will always be others in your life who insist that they know your callings better than you do, but only you can know your callings. Your callings are your truth, and no one else’s. Others can support you, but they cannot tell you what your callings are. They can also be jealous adversaries whom you should view as being there to bring out the best in you. Adversaries are not always the enemies we think they are; often they are blessings. As frustrating as they can be, adversaries unwittingly become your teachers as you gain insight that makes you better at what you do. Overcoming adversity requires sticking with your calling all the more strongly.

Nothing worth doing is ever easy, but it is necessary because callings are what keep you from that dreadful feeling of routinized emptiness. When people don’t follow their callings, they don’t tap into their gifts fully or even at all. Their highest human potential is lost, and their effervescent energy never engages the world. At work, they feel like the person who waits for Fridays to be liberated. Unable to bring their full self and creativity to their work, these folks feel that an awful lot of their life is wasted. Imagine if their very best energies were readily available for the benefit of others and themselves.

BLISSFUL BENEFITS

Research on callings is plentiful. An estimated half of working Americans have a sense of meaning and calling in their jobs, which is classic glass half-full. But only about half of those with a sense of calling are able to live this out due to circumstances and lack of opportunity. Those who live out a calling are the happiest workers, the most committed, the least mentally ill, the most engaged, and the most productive. They are also the healthiest. One of my favorite studies shows that older adults who rated high on a purpose-of-life scale had a 30 percent lower rate of cognitive decline than those who rated low.

Despite the challenges, we follow callings because they take us into the soul zone of love where time stands still. They move us into the flow of creativity and meaning that sometimes feels beyond time and place, as Chagall often felt when immersed in his blue angel painting.

As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” When you feel called to a vocation or endeavor, you know it. You feel driven, inspired, excited, determined. And you feel ready. Even when things seem to be going poorly and it is hard to make ends meet, you know you are doing what you are meant for.

As writer Joseph Campbell, my professor years back when he was visiting the University of Chicago, said, “If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.” Drawing from Campbell’s writing, everyone who truly follows their callings is heroic, because the contrary forces of “just fitting in” and maybe making a little more money are strong ones, although people who follow their calling generally do better financially over the long run.

Most people feel called to marriage and procreation, and others don’t. But in whatever way, everyone is called to encourage kindness in kids and to be a good neighbor. &