We bury the faint crackling of our inner fire underneath other, safer noises, and settle for a false life.
REAWAKENING THE SOUL
If you really want to make a wise vocation decision, you have to lead the kind of life that keeps your heart and soul awake every day. There are some activities that cover over the heart and soul—the ones that are too analytic, economic, prudently professional, and comfortably bourgeois. There are some that awaken the heart and engage the soul—music, drama, art, friendship, being around children, being around beauty, and, paradoxically, being around injustice. The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive. They get out of boring offices and take jobs where the problems are. They are the ones who see their desires, confront their desires, and understand what they truly yearn for.
Sometimes an artist can awaken the heart and soul. James Mill raised his son John Stuart to be a thinking machine. He taught him Greek at age two. Between the ages of eight and twelve, he read all of Herodotus, Homer, and Xenophon; six Platonic dialogues; and Virgil and Ovid (in Latin), while learning physics, chemistry, astronomy, and mathematics. He was given no holidays off. It all worked wonderfully—John Stuart Mill was an astounding prodigy—until he turned twenty and went into a deep depression.
Mill realized what constant study of data and nonfiction had done to him. He realized that “the habit of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings.” But then something pulled him out. It wasn’t an epiphany, some new burst of insight. It was poetry. William Wordsworth’s poetry: “What made Wordsworth’s poems medicine for my state of mind, was they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty….In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.”
Mill got depressed when he felt his desires go lukewarm. He pulled out of it when he discovered the existence of infinite desires, which are spiritual and moral, and not worldly desires. Henceforth, he wrote, “the cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed.”
Sometimes it’s simple glee that awakens the soul and helps us find our daemon. Shortly after Tom Clancy published The Hunt for Red October, I was invited to a dinner with Clancy. He had just come back from a tour of some battleship, courtesy of the U.S. Navy, where he had seen some sort of new weapons system. His face was aglow; his eyes glistened. He spent the first half of the meal gleefully describing that new system, practically bouncing in his chair with childish delight, going through each part of the technology in, to me, numbing detail. I remember thinking: Oh, that’s what it takes. You can’t write military bestsellers unless you genuinely feel what you’re writing about is the coolest thing on earth. It won’t work unless the boyish enthusiasm flows genuinely from your very heart. You can’t fake it.
Sometimes you see someone you really admire, and it arouses a fervent desire to be like that. In Mary Catherine Bateson’s book Composing a Life, she describes a woman named Joan who was studying to be a gym teacher. She liked dancing but never thought of herself as a dancer because she was husky, while dancers were petite. Then a dance teacher came into her school, as husky and as tall as Joan, but light on her feet. “I watched her move around, and I thought, well, you’re no bigger than she is, maybe you’ve got what it takes,” Joan recalled. “So I began really taking my dancing seriously, and after a while I began to be commended, I mean I was doing good. I think it was toward the end of that year when I really latched on and I said, Boy! That’s it. That’s what I am. I’m a dancer. I just knew it like that. And after that, everything was just sheer bliss that I had to do.”
Sometimes it’s tragedy that shocks us out of false desires and helps us see our real ones. In her book, The Power of Meaning, Emily Esfahani Smith describes