Quit your job. Pursue your vocation.
"We’ve traded gilded dreams for grey office Zoom meetings; but, we can do better."
We all have one. An unseen force stirring beneath our skin, pulling us towards the work we’re born to do.
The Greeks had no word for it but they felt the sacred weight of it in their bones.
During the early medieval period, Christians under the ringing tower bells of monasteries gave it a name -Vocation.
The lost devotion of work
For centuries, vocation – to be called by an otherworldly voice to one’s true work – remained within church walls. It wasn’t until Luther that divine work was truly recognised in others.
In the farmer who had reverence for his fields, in the blacksmith whose hammer banged like a volcanic rumble of devotion and in the sculptor who slowly released statues amongst soft white dust.
This idea penetrated the collective psyche and started to spread. And for a time, work was being seen as devotion. But the world changed and the sacred faded.
We’ve lost our way, we need to hear our vocations again.
"An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence." – Honore de Balzac (1799–1850), French Novelist and Playwright
Prepare to quit your job
Vocations have been clouded by the fog of industry and replaced by the mundane machinery of weekly paycheques.
We’ve traded gilded dreams for grey office Zoom meetings; but with all the collective wisdom we have living and breathing in this world, we can do better.
This is not about quitting one’s job to drift aimlessly in the wind, doing nothing with time.
This is about a world that’s forgotten itself. We need not rage against the machine, we need to step away from it. Giving it no more of our own blood as fuel. Taking hold of our own fate like a child of Saturn acknowledging the long road ahead.
Preparing ourselves to quit and pursue our calling.
A vocation is sacred work
We all have a vocation – sacred work that was woven into our soul at birth.
It may be glimpsed in atmospheric flashes behind closed eyes or heard in stillness when the world has gone quiet.
This calling helps us to unravel. Anchoring us in existence. Revealing an unshakeable truth and life direction which serves both ourselves and the world in the process. This is worthy work.
“It is not more vacation that we need – it is more vocation.” – Eleanor Roosevelt
A calling from where you belong
We must pursue our vocation, we wither away if we don’t.
When Saint Anthony started giving away his possessions to the poor it seemed mad. Stripping himself bare for the sake of his calling was irrational.
When Charles Bukowski walked out of his post office job for the last time his colleagues whispered on the way out. Writing poetry for a living was grounded in uncertainty.
When I left my job as a claims assessor for philosophy I was warned, “You’re better off in corporate consulting.”
What they saw as reckless was simply misunderstood. Forgotten knowledge that wasn’t handed down. They didn’t know that surrendering to the calling is how one arrives where they belong.
Lift your gaze
The modern world has us hunched – head down, neck bent, eyes tight from the days that blur together. Collecting paycheques that keep our bodies breathing but our collective spirit grasping for air.
This is no way to live. We must lift our heavy heads and begin looking up again. Leaving our jobs like the wisemen who journeyed by starlight, following our calling by raising our gaze towards the expansive vast space of the heavens.
The Greeks felt it before they had the words.
The Christians gave it a name.
And we feel it too, even under the rubble of a culture who has buried it in dust and duty.
Because the vocation is divine – surging beneath our skin and running through our bones. Hoping that we wake from our trance, rise from the ruins and step into a path that was always meant for us.
We can do better. Quit your job, pursue your vocation.
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Cant wait to start the journey, its so there its almost palpable🙏🙏✨✨
It's definitely a feeling that weighs heavily in the bone marrow for those who are tapped in. Not sure if its something that you can truly "find" though. If it's a calling, it finds you - no?