Swimming Upstream: What's Your Vocation?
A friend once explained it to me this way: “Vocation is more than a role that you have, but something you are particularly called to do, that drives you. For example, your vocation might be to teach. But that doesn’t mean you have to be a teacher – it means you are drawn to teach in whatever situation you find yourself in – whether as a parent, co-worker or catechist…”
How does one discover what their vocation is? It was clear from our discussion that this is a pressing question for young people today. And not just the young! Perhaps it is something we continually wrestle with throughout our lives as we decide how best to live true to who we are.
This was a particularly pressing question for me when I was in university. It seemed quite clear what our choices were then as law students: find a job in a law firm or work for the government. The only choice one had to make was which firm or which government department! But something about the inevitability of it disturbed me.
In the end some friends and I got together a group of like-minded people for a reading club of sorts, and spent hours in interesting discussions about what we wanted to do with our lives. We called ourselves “students swimming upstream”. That was a metaphor from an article we read, titled, “Letter to a Law Student Interested in Social Justice” by William Quigley. He observed that choosing to practice law for social justice was quite counter-cultural in a legal profession where making a lot of money was a “mainstream, traditional goal”. He wrote: “Those who practice social justice law are essentially swimming upstream while others are on their way down. Unless you are serious about your direction and the choices you make and the need for assistance, teamwork and renewal, you will likely grow tired and start floating along and end up going downstream with the rest.”This metaphor caught our imaginations. Most of us were concerned about how we could use our legal skills for the common good, and in the face of pressure to compete for high-paying jobs in prestigious law firms, we were determined to make conscious choices about how we wanted to live. About what kind of lawyers we wanted to be. Not to just “go with the flow”.
Another metaphor that struck me at that time was from a talk delivered by William Deresiewicz to a freshman class at Stanford University, in which he encouraged students to use “moral imagination” in their life choices, to be free to make counter-cultural choices and not be satisfied only with chasing after prestige. He said, “When you walk into Starbucks, you're offered a choice among a latte and a macchiato and an espresso and a few other things, but you can also make another choice. You can turn around and walk out.”
As things turned out, I did walk out of Starbucks. Others of our little group made different choices, according to what they thought best in their situations. Looking back, I think those hours of discussions were invaluable in helping us to become more aware of the values and principles we wanted to live, whatever the ways we chose to live them. I am very grateful to my fellow “swimmers” for giving me the courage and companionship to imagine something different. And I am glad to see also that those who have remained in touch are still living out their principles and ideals in the various life and work contexts they find themselves in now.
Then and now, they still inspire me.
Food for thought:
In what ways have you found yourself “swimming upstream” or “going with the flow” in your life choices?
What are the values and ideals that are important to you, and how do you live them out?
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