Some of his columns seem obvious and show-offy in a lecturing kind of way. But, he can be a wizard at occasionally penning characterful wisdom as evidenced by one my favorites, The Moral Bucket List, a piece published almost exactly ten years ago that suggested that the first half of our life we’re building our resumé and the second half of our life we’re creating the ingredients for our eulogy.
Last week, the Times published a longer piece by Brooks entitled “A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible” that is in the same wise genre (I wish I could publish the whole thing so you can read it as I know everyone doesn’t have a NYT subscription). He describes what it means to feel one’s calling, to be entranced by a great project, a hard challenge that feels essential to who you are. He writes,
“It is a great and underappreciated talent — the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned. School or career has given them a pragmatic, instrumental, efficiency-maximizing frame of mind. They live their life under pressure, so their head is down; they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them.”
He speaks to me and my dutiful sense of calling with investing money, time and life force into MEA, even during 2023 and 2024 when I was going through depleting surgeries, radiation, hormone depletion therapy, and alternative treatments. Brooks writes about what a vocation feels like,
“We surround these moments with commencement address clichés — follow your passion, follow your heart. But those phrases are so vague that they don’t mean anything. I want to understand more precisely what happens when one is gripped by a controlling desire. How exactly does some fervent commitment grow, take over your life and induce you to take on voluntary pain?…When you’ve fallen in love with a person, town or activity, it’s not because you calculated your way there; it’s because some flame was ignited by a force greater, darker and more passionate than your reasoning mind; it irradiates you, conquers you and demands obedience.”
As my mentor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi taught me, finding flow is assigning yourself just the right level of difficulty, the alchemy of challenge and skill. And, what distinguishes a calling from workaholism is inspiration rather than compulsion. The sacrifice to a passion feels natural and full of love. You do it not to distract yourself but to attract yourself…to encourage something from deep inside of you – maybe from your soul – to emerge. You are in labor, giving birth, full of pain and ecstasy. When I am writing or teaching, I can feel my spirit pulsing through me…as I do right now writing this morning’s blog post.
I’ll finish with a W.H. Auden poem that David Brooks included in his long piece as it captures what I’m feeling in this very moment:
You need not see what someone is doing
to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes:
a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision,
a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is,
that eye-on-the-object look.
-Chip