If you do this long enough, you begin to understand your own strengths and limitations, and you develop your own individual method. A few years into writing, I came to see how bad my memory is, and how hard it is to organize my thoughts sequentially. Ideas occur to me in some sort of random order, when I’m least expecting them. So I took to carrying around little notebooks in my back pocket, where I can put my jottings. When I research a piece, I collect hundreds of pages of printed documents. If a read a book, I photocopy all the important pages.
It turns out I think geographically. I need to see all my notes and pages physically laid out before me if I’m to get a sense of what I have. So I invented a system that works for me. I separate all my relevant papers into piles on the carpet of my study or living room. Each pile is a paragraph in my column or my book. My newspaper column is only 850 words, but it may require fourteen piles on the floor. The writing process is not sitting at the keyboard typing. It is crawling around on the carpet laying out my piles. Once that’s done, I pick up each pile from the floor and bring it to the big table on which I write, and I separate the paragraph piles into sentence piles. And then after I’ve typed the ideas on my keyboard, I throw out the pile and move to the next pile. Writing is really about structure and traffic management. If you don’t have the structure right, nothing else will happen. For me, crawling about on the floor working on my piles are the best moments of my job.
THE VOCATION MAKES THE PERSON
Work is the way we make ourselves useful to our fellows. “There may be no better way to love your neighbor,” Tim Keller put it, “whether you are writing parking tickets or software or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.”
Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.
Vocation can be a cure for restlessness. Mastering a vocation is more like digging a well. You do the same damn thing day after day, and gradually, gradually, you get deeper and better. “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself,” Emerson wrote, “add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, happy enough if he can truly satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.”
Emerson underlines one of the key elements of the commitment decision. At the beginning it involves a choice—choosing this or that vocation. But 99.9 percent of the time it means choosing what one has already chosen. Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It’s saying yes to the thing you’ve already said yes to.
Mike Beebe grew up in a tar shack, the son of a teenage single mom. He graduated from high school in Arkansas, got a college degree from Arkansas State, and a law degree from the University of Arkansas. In 1982, he was elected to the state legislature, and in 2007 he became governor. He became one of the most popular governors in state history, and in the nation. In 2010, Republicans were beating Democrats all around the nation, but in Arkansas Beebe swept all seventy-five counties on his way to reelection.
What was his secret? One key factor was that he had no national ambitions. Arkansas was his home and Arkansas was where he would focus all his energy. A Unitarian pastor in New York, Galen Guengerich, read about Beebe and drew the proper conclusion. Sometimes it’s right to move on and try something new, Guengerich observed,
but we also need to learn the virtue of staying put and staying true, of choosing again what we chose before. In my view that’s one of the main reasons we come to church.
We’re here not so much to make spiritual progress each week, though that’s wonderful when it happens. Rather, we mostly come for the consistency—for what remains the same from week to week: the comfort of the liturgy, the solace of the music, the reassuring sight of familiar faces, the enduring presence of ancient rites and timeless symbols. We’re here to remind ourselves of values that unite us and