I struggle to explain to people how academia is a calling for me. As if my whole life has been leading me to it in some way. I do not mean the 'job' but the work of thinking, contemplating, reflecting, writing about ideas, and so on. I suppose as a child when I felt an inner compulsion to write up my thoughts as I read the Bible, it was the calling in motion. Even starting this blog for that matter has been about it without me knowing it. A place to think, feel, write, which it has been. To explain a calling to someone who hasn't felt that call is like explaining a rose to a blind person or smell of garlic to one who doesn't have a sense of smell. There's no way to explain it, but if you try, you could start to sound like you have gone mad if the majority don’t have these senses. It's always a bit risky to talk about something that could sound like mumbo-jumbo to the rest. However, if you meet someone else who has seen a rose or smelt garlic, you don't have to explain anything at all. They just get it.

I was having a conversation with someone when that person mentioned that their spouse's life revolved around their kids. When I happened to mention something about anchoring life around doing what one loves, this person mentioned in a rather condescending tone, “oh, you mean a job.” Of course, in my case the job, the work, the doing what I love are in the same broad region. But they are not the same. For instance, I will continue to do what I love even if I didn’t have a job as I did even before I ever had one. But what this person was trying to communicate with the term and tone of 'job' was, 'something you do in return for an income' (you don’t have to love it). And if a ‘job’ is transactional, it would be easy to imply that a life revolving around that was lesser than a life revolving around something else, presumably more elevated, like relationships. I responded with a, “no, I don't mean a ‘job’. I mean something one loves, like playing music.” I mentioned ‘music’ because it holds the sense of enjoyment more prominently than if I had said 'writing'. An actual musician likely knows music is a lot of hard work, but the layperson probably does not think of it that way. 'Writing' on the other hand is experienced as hard by people who love it or hate it, I suppose. I then explained using Aristotle's analogy of the acorn and oak tree. If you are an acorn, you are going to be fulfilled only in realizing yourself fully as an oak tree. If you force an acorn to be a mango tree, it will never be happy. That is what I mean by finding one’s calling/doing what one loves—it is actualizing the potential you were endowed with.