tricky part of an annunciation moment is not having it, but realizing you’re having it. The world is full of beautiful things and moments of wonder. But sometimes they pass by without us realizing their importance. Often, we’re not aware of our annunciation moments except in retrospect. You look back and realize, “Okay, that’s when this all started….That was the freakishly unlikely circumstance that set things off on this wonderful course.”
The best thing about an annunciation moment is that it gives you an early hint of where your purpose lies. The next best thing is it rules out a bunch of other things. “Lucky is the man who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him,” Walker Percy observes.
Ed Wilson’s annunciation moment involved an additional step, which was also, in the long run, a stroke of good fortune. One day that summer on Paradise Beach he was fishing. He caught a pinfish but got careless when yanking it from the water. It flew up and flopped in his face, with one of the spines on its dorsal fins piercing the pupil of Wilson’s right eye. The pain was excruciating, but Wilson didn’t want to stop fishing, so he stayed out there in his pain all day. That night he told the host family what had happened, but by then the pain had dulled and they didn’t take him to a doctor. His eye clouded over several months later and then, after a botched procedure, he lost sight in that eye altogether.
Wilson was going to be a naturalist, but he was never going to study something like birds, which required stereoscopy to see properly. He was going to have to study something small, something he could pick up with his fingers and bring close for inspection with his good left eye. Fortunately, that same year he happened to be walking down Palafox Street in Pensacola, Florida, when he came across some lion ants swarming out of their nest. He stood there with the same feeling he’d had by the ocean. Here was another hidden and entrancing world. He would study ants and go on to scientific greatness.
Forty years later, Wilson happened to be on the same street in Pensacola. He saw the descendants of those first ants scurrying about. Fascinated, he got down on his hands and knees, peering once again at the lion ants. An elderly man, passing by, was alarmed to see a grown man crawling on all fours on the sidewalk, and asked if he needed any help. But of course, Wilson was just returning to his childhood love and continuing his lifelong call.
ELEVEN
What Mentors Do
Wilson didn’t build his career by himself. He had mentors. The first was a professor at the University of Alabama named Bert Williams. Williams took him on field trips, lent him a dissecting microscope, welcomed him into his home, and generally provided Wilson with a practical sense of what life as a natural scientist might look like.
Williams seems to have done the things that good mentors do. Good mentors coach you through the various decisions of life, such as where to go to graduate school or what jobs to take. Good mentors teach you the tacit wisdom embedded in any craft.
Any book or lecture can tell you how to do a thing. But in any craft, whether it is cooking or carpentry or science or leadership, there are certain forms of knowledge that can’t be put into rules or recipes—practical forms of knowledge that only mentors can teach. The philosopher Michael Oakeshott tried to capture the ineffable quality of this practical knowledge by telling the story of a Chinese wheelwright who was making a wheel at the lower end of a great chamber while his duke, Duke Huan of Ch’i, was reading a book at the upper end. Putting aside his mallet and chisel, the wheelwright called out to the duke and asked him what he was reading.
“A book that records the words of the sages,” the duke answered.
“Are those sages alive?” the wheelwright asked.
“They are dead,” the duke replied.
“In that case, what you are reading can be nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men.”
The duke was outraged. How dare the wheelwright dismiss such a book and such sages? “If you can explain your statement, I shall let it pass. If you cannot, you shall die!” the duke thundered.
“Speaking as a wheelwright,” the craftsman began, “I look at the matter this way: When I am making