The Calling
Sean Moore
Somewhere, the Tarzan to your Mary Jane is swinging through the jungle on a vine.
One of the best pieces of advice I received was on finding a calling. Keep trying things, she said, until you find whatever it is that you you love doing and that you find yourself unable to do. That’s when you’ll know.
That seemed strange and counterintuitive to me at the time. There were plenty of things that I loved doing – building Lego, making paper mâché volcanoes – and there were also plenty of things I found myself unable to do – knitting, playing the bagpipe – but the two regions didn’t seem to have any sort of overlap. This didn’t seem like good advice.
And then I discovered software design. Here was something that fit right in the center of that Venn diagram. There was the design aspect of it, being able to create whatever you imagined, to do whatever you want, a love worth having. And then there was the use of a programming language to accomplish it, which I had no grasp of, a task worthy of being unable to do.
So I took the advice I was given. And then banged my head on the wall for the next two years trying to learn something so foreign to me, so rigid compared to the fluid way I thought. The strict syntax clashed with my typical style of intentional grammatical rule-breaking. I pulled my hair out, spent countless sleepless nights going nowhere, and I had little to show for my efforts that spilled out to the rest of my life.
And I loved every second of it.
Some challenges are born into, and they must be faced for no reason other than that they are there. Some challenges, too, are thrust upon us, and we have no control over when they arrive, how they present themselves, or what tools we have to solve them. In either case, the cause is out of our hand; all we can do is try to make the effect we want
But we also have the ability to seek out challenges. We can approach what we want, based on our interests, on our schedule, with the tools that we have at our disposal. There’s a very compelling desire in us all to approach the familiar: after all, with all these challenges that we have no control over, there’s enough uncertainty in the world.
But there’s so much more to find in the unfamiliar, the exotic, the challenges in our lives that we haven’t yet exposed ourselves to. By bringing ourselves to bear against something we know nothing about and are unprepared for, we may just learn something incredibly value about ourselves.
Perhaps, even, we may find a calling.