FOLLOW YOUR CALLINGS
By Gregg Levoy

I used to be a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, about 20 years ago, and while there I did a story on the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus coming to town. In a moment of journalistic zeal I let the animal trainer convince me that riding bareback on an elephant at the head of the Barnum & Bailey circus parade would add color to my story.

The only way to get up on the elephant was to use a ladder, and the only way to stay up there during the parade was to hang on to his ears, which had the extremely disagreeable habit of flapping a lot. Thus if I didn't remain extremely flappable I would have gotten thrown, and it was probably 12 or 15 feet to the ground----a concern that, to be honest, paled in comparison to my concern about how stupid I looked up there. I was the first thing anybody saw in the circus parade, wearing my business clothes and hanging desperately onto the elephant's ears, and I'm sure my comportment didn't exactly capture the theme of "The Greatest Show on Earth."

It was an experience, though, that had a lot in common with the experience of encountering a calling, in that I was carried off by something bigger than myself, in that it was nerve-wracking at the same time that it was exhilarating, and in that the elephant couldn't have cared less. By that I mean I've discovered an unsettling truth: my soul doesn't seem to care what price I have to pay to follow my callings. My happiness, my security, my vanity don't seem to matter to it, although staying up on the elephant does.

A calling is an organism, a living entity, with an animus all its own. It exerts a centrifugal force on our lives, continually pushing out from within. It drives us toward authenticity and aliveness, against the tyranny of fear and inertia and occasionally reason, and it is metered by the knocking in our hearts that signals the hour. If you are at all faithful to your callings, they will lead you to a point of decision. Here you must decide whether to say yes or no, now or later, ready or not. And they will keep coming back until you give them an answer.

Saying yes to a calling tends to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn't make a bit of sense, but the other half knows your life won't make sense without. You find yourself following the blind spiritual instinct that tells you your life has purpose and meaning, that this calling is part of it, and that you must act on it despite the temptations to back down and run for cover that will divide even the most grimly resolute against themselves.

The bigger the calling, too, the more likely it will fling opposing energies into your life. One part of you wants to awaken, another to sleep. One part wants to follow, another to run like hell. I have heard it said that heroism, or heroinism, can be redefined for the modern age as the ability to tolerate paradox, to hold seemingly opposing energies within us and still retain the ability to function. Thus a heroic approach to the oxwork of bringing calls into form is one in which you take them on with no illusions, knowing that your endeavors will always be attended by the conflict between the voices of faith and doubt, whose concussive debate will pit your soul against your mind in a boxing ring. It means following your heart and contending with whatever spills from it when it tips. It means knowing that whatever you gain by taking risks----new freedom, new love, success, power, a dream come true----you will also suffer loss, and that loss is a skill.

Unfortunately, we often simply tune out the longings we feel rather than confront and act on them, trading our authenticity for security and generally settling for less. We fear the conniptions of change, the disapproval of others, the prospect of what might be demanded of us in pursuing them, and perhaps we even fear the hope that such dreams evoke in us, and the power that we know is dammed up behind our resistance. As an acquaintance of mine once said, "You shall know the truth and it shall make you nap."

Most people don't follow their dreams until the fear of doing so is finally exceeded by the pain of not doing so, although it's appalling how high a threshold people have for this quality of pain. Those who refuse their calls, who are afraid of becoming what they perhaps already are-----unhappy-----will not, of course, experience the unrest (or the joy) that usually accompanies the embrace of a calling. Having attempted nothing, they haven't failed, and they can console themselves that if none of their dreams come true, then at least neither will their nightmares.

"Your life mirrors what you put into it or withhold from it," say the authors of Art and Fear. "When you hold back, it holds back. When you hesitate, it stands there staring, hands in its pockets. But when you commit, it comes on like blazes." When you give yourself over to the life of the soul, in other words, that life reciprocates. Your devotion to the calling sets up something like a magnetic field, a field of gravitation, and it draws things to you: resources and contacts, opportunities and interest and insights, synchronicities and benedictions. Sometimes even the money will follow.

And once you begin to receive these gifts, you find yourself not so willing anymore to settle for less, not so easily put off the scent by the disapproval of others. You begin to feel like a character in a poem by the Indian poet Mirabai, a character who said, "I have felt the swaying of the elephant's shoulders, and now you want me to climb on a jackass?"

You begin to understand that hidden deep in the clockworks of the heart is the beneficent fear of living life, as Henry Miller once put it, without ever leaving the bird cage, and that touching that fear is life-giving. Outside the cage there is life in its fleshy and toothsome grandeur, all the spill and stomp and shout of it, all the come and go of it, all of it waiting for us to act on the one hand, and on the other hand rushing down the hourglass.