No need to have a "calling." Just live your life.

Someone emailed me a link to a short essay on the Secular Buddhist Association site, "What's your  calling or purpose in life?" I like the author's conclusion: there's no reason to feel that you have a special calling.

After all, where would that come from? 

The notion of a calling or purpose in life presupposes that such exists somewhere outside of the person's own mind, that somehow we're supposed to identify what we're meant to do with our life as if that was a law of nature akin to gravity or electromagnetism. 

Or maybe a better analogy is finding our life's compass, which would point us in the direction we're meant to go. But again, this presumes that there's a "magnetic" purpose that is separate and distinct from our everyday choices about what to do.

Here's an excerpt from the essay that makes a lot of sense to me.

I feel fortunate where I am now in life. I have no desire to look for purpose in my life. I don’t feel the compulsion of a calling. I am content to follow this journey we call life and see where it leads moment by moment. It is a feeling of peace, of openness that I didn’t have while being driven by goals, by a calling, by a purpose in life. I’m relieved to have dropped such notions, and for me they really were notions, and instead just be in whatever life brings each day.

I worry when I hear “spiritual leaders”, people regarded as sages and full of wisdom, speak in terms of finding purpose, finding your calling. What if there is no purpose? What if you don’t have a calling? Are you going to be the dog chasing his own tail? Do we have to have a purpose? Does our life have to have “meaning?” I think we should asks ourselves what we really mean by all that. What is driving the need for meaning?

That’s not to say there is something wrong with goals or direction, intent. Having short term goals and direction is useful, as long as we aren’t clinging to expectations, as long as we are open to changes and shifts that will inevitably occur. Life can throw a rock in the waters of resolve at any minute.  Expect change, because change is the norm.

Maybe it’s ok to be without purpose or calling and see what life hands you.

 

Comments

[vinny]

All the schools , colleges , institutions are trying to instill obsessive purpose in students . Instead of helping them , this is making them neurotic. This premise of purpose stems from the assumption that humans would lead purposeless life which is totally rubbish assumption. Fact of life is that most of the path-breaking innovation has been done by people who were ridiculed by type A obsessive people for not having ruling purpose in life. An artificial dam may have purpose but so does a carefree stream of water.

[Spencer Tepper]

If you stand back from life and withdraw from the various roles of want and should, you do see direction. Life progresses, and you can, with a little consideration, see those progressions. And we are also progressing. We are moving, as a careful review of our own history, our personal history, shows. The past is gone. We are not who we were. So whether we like it or not our one dimensional movement through time is attended with changes. And those progress from one point to the next. Events may disrupt those changes and make their own. Conditioning alters our thinking.

So if you see the direction, and understand more about what you were and what you are becoming, and clearly what you will not be in this lifetime, you can say that direction is your "purpose". But whether you embrace it or not, it's you. You don't become something beyond time ignoring it. You don't become without purpose ignoring the direction you are moving in.

Purpose is already there, without your participation.

[7]

Real meditation
is 100% stopping the thinking process.
TOTALLY
Pls don't use the word for contemplations, . . . & other caprioles

Then you will "leave" this body
and the Love Play starts

But better, first go where the sweet inviting beautiful seducing Songs are

777

ps
No confused - lost - unsure - unclear and disoriented anywhere to see at anytime
What stays is PERPLEXED & little bit BEWILDERED

FEROCIFLY too

7