I have returned home. My little visit is over. While I was in several airports I had the now very common opportunity to reflect on "my place in this world." Have you had this airport experience? I think it will be more common if you, like me, often travel alone. The last time I was accompanied by someone I knew was in 2006. In my solitude, I am prone to look at the many, many people that cross my path, hear their accents, witness their interactions with others and wonder about their lives. Eventually, this leads me to wonder about my own life, and as I consider my position on a plane heading somewhere, I also consider my body and soul on a journey and ask those existential questions. Who? What? Why? When?
In my last semester of Grad. school I took a class dedicated to careers - both the developmental aspects of an individual's career experiences (first jobs to professional careers to housewife transitionings to part time work to retirement) as well as the discussion of whether the career path of choice, even one's ideal career, their dream job is ever the same as their calling. One book that we read suggested that these were very often not the same thing at all; that one might find their calling in an area that should never be their source of income, or an income that should never be their source of calling.
As you may have gathered, my perspective is blatantly theist. My existential anxiety is quieted by my conception of a world created by The supreme being, God. This is how I survive: by coming to full term in my understanding that life is in many ways as meaningless as my worst existential crises would suggest, that I am but an insignificant dot and that I will one day, cease. When I add my hope and (I will dare to include) knowledge that a higher power exists, with foreknowledge and supremacy, as an entity that supersedes a small, meaningless earth and transcends man's silly "time", I can find meaning for my life in my pursuit of such a being.
I think that people's existential answers to those questions I asked earlier form the basis of their "callings". For me, my impressions of a calling in my life will be based on my hopes, my personal theology and the private stirrings of my heart. The grounding that halts my sudden need to move to a starving African nation and open an orphanage or to buy a large inner city building in New York or London or Port of Spain and start a young or surprised parent training house is a mixture of my faith, my upbringing and, well, just good sense. I think though, it is important to pay attention to those sudden captivating urgings. As a twenty-, thirty-, forty- (any-) something you may not be in a position to do everything you hope to, but my opinion is that it is crucial that while you find yourself flailing arms through the darkness of a veiled purpose that you don't discredit your own heart. There is always a reason you feel the way you do.
In my last semester of Grad. school I took a class dedicated to careers - both the developmental aspects of an individual's career experiences (first jobs to professional careers to housewife transitionings to part time work to retirement) as well as the discussion of whether the career path of choice, even one's ideal career, their dream job is ever the same as their calling. One book that we read suggested that these were very often not the same thing at all; that one might find their calling in an area that should never be their source of income, or an income that should never be their source of calling.
As you may have gathered, my perspective is blatantly theist. My existential anxiety is quieted by my conception of a world created by The supreme being, God. This is how I survive: by coming to full term in my understanding that life is in many ways as meaningless as my worst existential crises would suggest, that I am but an insignificant dot and that I will one day, cease. When I add my hope and (I will dare to include) knowledge that a higher power exists, with foreknowledge and supremacy, as an entity that supersedes a small, meaningless earth and transcends man's silly "time", I can find meaning for my life in my pursuit of such a being.
I think that people's existential answers to those questions I asked earlier form the basis of their "callings". For me, my impressions of a calling in my life will be based on my hopes, my personal theology and the private stirrings of my heart. The grounding that halts my sudden need to move to a starving African nation and open an orphanage or to buy a large inner city building in New York or London or Port of Spain and start a young or surprised parent training house is a mixture of my faith, my upbringing and, well, just good sense. I think though, it is important to pay attention to those sudden captivating urgings. As a twenty-, thirty-, forty- (any-) something you may not be in a position to do everything you hope to, but my opinion is that it is crucial that while you find yourself flailing arms through the darkness of a veiled purpose that you don't discredit your own heart. There is always a reason you feel the way you do.
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