Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all our clues about living from the people and powers around us.

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

"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 one's nature, and it will always fail.

"those who can, do, and those who can't, teach"

there is as much guidance in what does not and cannot happen in my life as there is in what can and does-maybe more.

Depression is the ultimate state of disconnection, not only between people, and between mind and heart, but between one's self-image and public mask.

Disconnection may be hell, but it is better than false connections.

When we live in the close-knit ecosystem called community, everyone follows and everyone leads.

The best leaders in every setting reward people for taking worthwhile risks even if they are likely to fail. These leaders know that the death of an initiative-if it was tested for good reasons-is always a source of new learning.

The notion that our lives are like the eternal cycle of the seasons does not deny the struggle or the joy, the loss or the gain, the darkness or the light, but encourages us to embrace it all-and to find in all of it opportunities for growth.

we run headlong into our own egos, which want desperately to believe that we are always in charge.

"The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them."