Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

by Parker J. Palmer

the life I am living is not the same as the life that wants to live in me.

What am I meant to do? Who am I meant to be?

"Let your life speak."

"Let the highest truths and values guide you. Live up to those demanding standards in everything you do."

"Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent."

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 life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.

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 at the heart of my own identity, not the standards by which I must live-but the standards by which I cannot help but live if I am living my own life.

there is a great gulf between the way my ego wants to identify me, with its protective masks and self-servi...

We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.

the words we speak often contain counsel we are trying to give ourselves.

Vocation does not come from a voice "out there" calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice "in here" calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.

Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, "In the coming world, they will not ask me: `Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: Why were you not Zusya?"'=

Vocation at its deepest level is, "This is something I can't not do, for reasons I'm unable to explain to anyone else and don't fully understand myself but that are nonetheless compelling."

Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations-projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves-and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.

They decide no longer to act on the outside in a way that contradicts some truth about themselves that they hold deeply on the inside.

no punishment anyone might inflict on them could possibly be worse than the punishment they inflict on themselves by conspiring in their own diminishment.

no reward anyone might give us could possibly be greater than the reward that comes from living by our own best lights.

"But a lot of way has closed behind me, and that's had the same guiding effect."

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.

Perhaps the research I was doing was what a good sociologist "ought" to do, but it felt meaningless to me, and I felt fraudulent doing it. 't'hose feelings were harbingers of things to come, things that eventually led me out of the profession altogether. Obviously,

Each of us arrives here with a nature, which means both limits and potentials.

When I try to do something that is not in my nature or the nature of the relationship, way will close behind me.

burnout in my experience results from trying to give what I do not possess-the ultimate in giving too little! Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.