to one’s identity, it’s possible to feel, for example, ‘I really should do more to help those in need, but it’s just too hard’ or ‘I just can’t find the time.’ But when the issue lies at the very heart of who one is, it becomes unthinkable to turn away.”
The second thing you notice about the Orwell story is that he had a presentiment of his vocation when he was young. But then he walked away from it. Maybe he forgot about it. Maybe he couldn’t figure out how to make a living. He had to go through a period of wandering before he settled back into the vocation that called him all along. This, too, is not uncommon. Often people feel a call but don’t really understand it, or they forget the call or just wander off. It’s only later that they make up a neat linear narrative of their life to describe how they took the road less traveled.
People who write about vocation often cite a poem by William Wordsworth that makes vocation finding sound straightforward and delightful. Early one morning, when he was in college, Wordsworth was walking back to his home in Hawkshead, England, after a summer night’s dance. Two miles into his hike, dawn broke. He found himself greeted by a morning “more glorious than I had ever beheld.” The sea, he wrote, seemed to be laughing in the distance. The mountains were bright as clouds. All of creation was pure delight: “Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, / And Laborers going forth into the fields.” He was overwhelmed by beauty. It touched him at the level of heart and soul. Suddenly a switch flipped inside:
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked
In thankful blessedness, which even yet remains.
His heart was full. He himself didn’t make a promise, but somehow “vows were made for me.” He was destined, he realized at that moment, to become a poet, a dedicated spirit, to spend his life capturing what he then felt. If he didn’t fulfill those vows, he would, he realized, be “sinning greatly.” He’d be denying his own nature and his own destiny.
What the tellers of that tale usually don’t mention is that this account is semi-mythical. Wordsworth recounted this clear moment when he was older and looking back on his life, but it wasn’t so clear at the time. Drifting into his midtwenties, Wordsworth was trying to find something to do with his life. He slid through university, despising most of it, writing very little poetry. He tried joining the clergy while doing a fair share of drinking and dancing. He thought about becoming a lawyer, and spent four months bumming around London doing very little. He fathered a child while touring around France, observed the French Revolution, abandoned the mother of his child, imagined starting a magazine, thought of becoming a political reporter, tried to get a job as a tutor in Ireland. Wordsworth, in other words, had to endure a period of drift while waiting to settle into his groove in life, the way most of us do.
Wordsworth’s life came into focus only after two strokes of good fortune he couldn’t have imagined beforehand. A casual acquaintance of his named Raisley Calvert saw a spark of genius in him, when almost no one else did. Calvert readjusted his will so that Wordsworth would get £900 on the event of his death. Calvert serves as the patron saint of a rare sort of social type: the person who can see a gift in others, push that person toward their vocation, and provide practical assistance to make it happen.
Calvert performed one more service. At age twenty-one, he died, giving Wordsworth a financial cushion. Shortly thereafter, another friend offered Wordsworth and his sister the use of their country home in exchange for tutoring their sons. In two strokes, Wordsworth had money and a rent-free residence of a grand estate. The rest is history.
The summons to vocation is a very holy thing. It feels mystical, like a call from deep to deep. But then the messy way it happens in actual lives doesn’t feel holy at all; just confusing and screwed up. Over the next few chapters I’ll try to describe how vocations are found and grow.
TEN
The Annunciation Moment
When E. O. Wilson was seven, his parents announced they were getting