You need to know what to look
for, and here's a primer
Post published by Gregg Levoy
on May 06, 2015 in Passion!
I used to do a lot of stone
sculpting, and when you want to find out whether a stone is “true,” you bang on
it with a hammer. If it gives off a dull tone, that means the stone has faults
running through it that are likely to crack it apart when you work on it. But
if it gives off a clear ring, one that hangs in the air for a moment, that
means the stone is “true,” has “integrity,” and most importantly, will hold up
under repeated blows.
This is exactly the information
you need to know about your passions and callings. You need to know they ring
true, have integrity, and are going to hold up under repeated blows—the kind
the world specializes in, the kind you’re going to encounter the moment you
take your passions, calls, commitments, and convictions out into the world where
they’re going to get banged on.
One of the best ways to find
out whether they’re “true” is to get into the habit of continually tapping in
and listening to yourself with what Saint Benedict called “the ear of the
heart.” It’s the core of what spiritual traditions refer to as discernment, of
clarifying your calls, and it sometimes requires not just pick-and-shovel work,
but patience on the order of years.
It also helps if you know what
to look for—what characterizes “integrity” in a passion or calling.
It’s one of the questions I
routinely asked the people I interviewed for the Callings book: How did you
know it was a true call? How did you figure out that you were on the right
path, or that you were the right person? How did you know whether the call came
from soul/God/passion, or whether it came from ego/ wishful thinking/the desire
for financial security/the desire to show the bastards?
The responses people gave me
were so consistent, I can list them for you. Here are six signs that a passion
or calling is “true”:
1) It keeps coming back, no
matter how much you ignore it. A poet named Francis Thompson once wrote a poem
called Hound of Heaven, which is about God. He referred to God as a hound-dog
because of what hound dogs are famous for, which is tracking people down. They
can get one whiff of you and follow you for a hundred miles. In other words,
our passions and callings may be “still small voices,” but the true ones have
staying power. It’s the blessing and the curse of them—the search party doesn’t
retire.
2) The true calls tend to come
at you from multiple directions—gifts, talents, dreams both day and night, body
symptoms, synchronicities, the books that mysteriously make their way onto your
nighttable, the way events and opportunities unfold in your life. In other
words, there’s a clustering effect, and you’ve got to connect the dots.
3) There’s a feeling of
rightness about it. It just feels right. You may not be able to explain it, but
you can’t deny it either.
4) Your enthusiasm for it tends
to sustain itself over time, and doesn’t just peter out after a few weeks or
months or semesters. You even feel a kind of affinity or affection for all the
mundane tasks involved in bringing these passions to fruition, and they all
have them. No matter how exalted, every passion or calling has its version of
licking stamps and stuffing envelopes, making cold calls and tacking posters up
on telephone poles.
Author Malcolm Gladwell
calculates that mastery in most endeavors requires at least 10,000 hours of
dedicated practice—the math: 90 minutes a day for 20 years—and anyone who’s
ever been in a play or a band knows that the amount of time they spend
rehearsing compared to performing is something like 90-10. But it’s passion that
largely explains people’s willingness to put up with that equation. to practice
the same lines or lyrics for thousands of hours for the chance to go public
with it barely a tenth of the time.
5) It will scare you. Some
people even told me that they figured if a call felt safe, it probably wasn’t
the right path, but if it scared them, it probably was, because it meant they
were close to something vital.
I’m always amused by a bumper
sticker campaign I see all around the country on my travels. I think it’s for a
clothing company, but it says, “No Fear.” And I don’t buy it. Fear is a
biological imperative—it’s hardwired in us. The fight-or-flight mechanism is a
perfect example. I think what can happen sometimes is that something else
becomes more important to you than the fear you feel, and then you act with
real courage and conviction. But no fear? I don’t think so. In fact, I saw one
of these bumper stickers in Arizona a few years back. Same sticker, but with a
slight alteration made in it, I think in the name of credibility. It said,
“Some Fear.”
6) The truth or falseness of a
passion or calling is ultimately in the results. In other words, you’ve got to
be willing to try it out, to experiment, to go down the path a little ways—even
if you’re not sure it’s the path—and take field notes.
What you do is take a step
toward some passion and look at the feedback your life gives you. Take a step
and see if your energy expands or contracts. Take another step and see if you
feel more awake or more asleep. Another step—what do your dreams at night tell
you? Another step—what does your body tell you? Another step—what do your
friends tell you? It’s the old gospel criteria: by their fruits you shall know
them.
