Discover Your Inner Calling

Follow The Direction Your Internal Compass Is Pointing To
Growing up in the Walden County Home for Boys, New York, life for Evan Taylor didn't really look any different from any of the multitudes of orphans who passed out of that place before him, as well as any of the multitudes of kids who will pass out after he did. Evan Taylor was just another paper of data in the Child Services Department. Except that his peers thought he was a freak, as he seemed to be possessed by a firm conviction that his parents would find him some day. And the department counselor found the child's interest in wind chimes rather quirky and quaint and charming. But Evan Taylor was not an ordinary child. They eventually called him a "child prodigy". But that is just another name given to the phenomenon of discovering one's inner calling early on in life.

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* Promotional Poster of the movie 'August Rush', wiki. Performed by Freddie Highmore as Evan Taylor / August Rush.
Ever since his mind developed the capability to hold the train of his own thoughts and to perceive his own emotions, the boy knew what his inner calling was. He was drawn towards music. He believed in music, "the way some people believed in fairy tales".

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* Final scenes of the movie - "August Rush", performed by Freddie Highmore, Keri Russell, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Terrence Howard, Jamia Simone Nash, and Marian Seldes; YouTube/leadmare. The child prodigy knows what he is supposed to do in his life. And he fulfils his inner calling. This movie may be a piece of fiction, but we have people all around us who too manage to discover their inner calling sooner or later. And then there are some who don't manage to.
So he steps out of the orphanage, hops into a passing-by vegetable produce truck, comes to the city, and runs into a man who ran a gang of children who earned a living by playing music on street corners and in parks. Escaping from the man's clutches, Evan bumps into Hope, the young choir girl, who leads him to the Juilliard school where he gets the education that smoothens the rough edges and hews the raw talent of his prodigal power. And brings him face to face with his parents at the open-air New York Philharmonic Concert where he gets to perform. August Rush achieves all this because he followed his inner calling. It was his inner calling that drives him out of the orphanage one night and puts him on the stage of the New York Philharmonic Concert that night. It was his inner calling that helps him to not give in, to not succumb, even in the face of odds.

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* 'Self Psychology And The Humanities', by Heinz Kohut, Amazon.com. Kohut describes the self in relation to the elements of the environment that the self leans upon and imbibes in order to 'express' itself, to make itself 'complete'. He calls these elements "selfobjects" (without the hyphen). The imposition of the will of our parents or elders about what our life's goals should be; or the influence of ideas of people who at some point of time we thought were our good role models --- these are our selfobjects; and these usually decide what we end up doing with our lives. If it is in resonance with our true inner calling, then great, congratulations, you have done it. But if it isn't, then the sooner you came to this realization, and the sooner you made the necessary structural changes in your thinking and in the tangible planes of your life, the better it is.
The phrase "inner calling" sounds like a chapter of a treatise devoted to some deeply profound metaphysical concepts. People's voices take on a hushed reverential tone when they utter the phrase. But reflect upon it and some general outlines begin to emerge from the haze. We begin to understand that "inner calling" stands for one's own sense of one's purpose in life, one's own sense of one's deepest goals, and one's own sense of one's ambitions. And this sense comes with instinct honed further through introspection. We might exhibit different states of existence at different times, depending on the time of the day, the food we ate a few hours ago, the people we are with at the moment, the money in our bank account along with our assets and liabilities, our worries and fears, as also the circumstances we are in. Aristotle's hylemorphism says that throughout all the flux, there is a core, nuclear, self, which remains unchangeable. This core self does not change, it remains constant. We hold our most enduring values and ideals in this core self. These enduring values and ideals give us a sense of who we are and what we are. One set of these enduring values and ideals falls under the category of "inner calling".


Our sense of who we are and what we are is the most precious of our possessions, more precious than all the tangible wealth that we and our neighborhood Joneses who we compete with can hope to together accumulate. So it is like a safety box built of walls of impregnable steel thicker and sturdier than the UL Class 3 vaults --- where we store our deepest goals, purposes and ambitions. We don't want them to be affected or damaged by the expediency of the moment. Mystics say that the content in this safety box has a past; that we bring forward these goals, purposes and ambitions along with the rest of the stuff from our past lives. The content follows a timeline, which means that they point to a future, to a certain destiny, to a fulfillment which we are supposed to attain; and which we must attain. When the moment comes for the last breath to leave the lungs, the Universe's Accountant simply adjusts the actions and deeds undertaken in this lifetime with the contents of the safety box, and the safety box is carried forward to the next lifetime. And so it continues. It is a law of Nature; and is as natural and as automatic as is the snapping of the over-weighted apple from its branch and its falling on the ground.


There is another associated Law in play here. When our actions and deeds are in resonance with our true, inner calling, our efforts bear immediate fruit. And there is abundance. There may or may not be commercial success attached to the abundance. Commercial success, if it happens, is a byproduct; a spin-off, if you will. The focal point here is the resonance providing us a sense of fulfillment, a certain joie de vivre - the utter joy of living, of being. And what happens when our efforts are not resonating with our inner calling? The outcome of our efforts will be a trickle, if at all; and once again it does not matter if some commercial success happens to be attached to the outcome. Ever felt what it would be like when you try to run up an escalator that is moving down? Can you visualize the struggle? Try it the next time you visit the mall or the airport or wherever else they lay these mobile contraptions these days. Now do you find something similar happening in your own life too? A sense of putting in too much of an effort, and the outcome not being worth crowing much about? A sense of emptiness, a void? Ah, then this only means that your actions are going against the law of nature.


Dorothea Lange contracted polio when she was seven, that left her semi-crippled for life. On top of that, her father one day vanished all of a sudden when she turned twelve, without leaving any contact address. Graduating from high school in the Manhattan of 1913 meant taking up feminine-centric jobs such as nurse, teacher or librarian. Dorothea shocked her mother by announcing that she wants to be a photographer. Photography was her inner calling; she had discovered. She learnt the ropes of the trade by taking up odd-jobs in photography studios, all the while observing carefully how professionals went about doing their job and how they handled their equipment.

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* 'Dorothea Lange in 1936, photographer', wiki.
Ignoring admonishments from her mother, Dorothea broke away from her childhood past and left New York to settle in San Francisco. Pursuing her passion for photography brought her commercial success, and she discovered that her clients more-than-liked her outputs, enough for her to be able to set up her own portrait studio. The onset of the Great Depression brought her face-to-face with the destitute underclass pouring into the city. It was when she saw in them a reflection of her own image - of an individual who is struggling, and trying to cope with and overcome circumstances with whatever pride they had - that she finally came into her own.

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* Lange's 'Migrant Mother', Florence Owens Thompson, wiki. Her photos brought out the stark reality of the times of the Great Depression.
The decision to include in her photo portfolio such clients that could not pay, to chronicle through the visual medium the lives of those who are suffering and down and out, was another facet of her inner calling. She discovered the joy of capturing for posterity images of ordinary men and women going about their lives with as much quiet self-dignity as they could muster, whether it was while waiting in the line to be gifted a couple of bread slices, or while waiting for nobody in particular to take care of them. Soon, her portraits of Ordinary Life began coming to the notice of the extraordinary people. People like Paul Taylor, who in the course of time came to love her, to value her for what she was, and who ended up becoming her alter-ego. And how did she achieve all this? By following her inner calling, that's how.

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* 'An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion' - Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, wiki
The challenge is two-fold: one, to discover what our inner calling is. And two, to identify and overcome internal and external forces of resistance that come in the way of implementing that which we have come to "being" for.


The question arises: how does one discover one's calling? Is there some course taught by some university somewhere in this world, or some seminar that one could attend, where they give you the key by which to unlock the safety box that holds all our deepest desires and ambitions that we have allegedly carried over from our past life? Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge at least, such an Arcanum is not to be found. So how does one open the padlock on the safety box where all our life's purpose, our deepest goals and our ambitions lie hidden? People have this tendency to use the key of rational logic to try and turn the tumblers in the lock. The problem with logic is that sometimes its own rationalizations limit its usefulness. To my mind, the real keys that can do the trick are cast from the metal of intuition, and whose notches are intricately designed by the dexterous hands of faith. It is not cold, hard logic, but warm, fuzzy intuition tempered with faith in our destiny that leads us to open the safety box, so that we can learn for ourselves what our calling in life is.


Identifying and overcoming the internal and external forces of existence is an even more interesting part. Unknowingly, we spend our entire life battling these forces. Chances are that as you read this, right at this moment there is a battle going on within you involving first an attempt to find the hidden demons and then to vanquish them. Usually, these demons take shelter in us during the process of growing up, and they are nothing but a manifestation of the projections of our parents or seniors. It is during the process of our growing up, when we are at our most vulnerable and have to depend on the others to protect and nurture us, that we without our knowledge succumb to the projections of the people around. These are more often than not people who are themselves out of tune with their own respective inner calling and ignorant of their own respective destiny. These are more often than not people whose own sense of self-worth has been wounded by the sharp knife of experiences inflicted upon them by Life, and who, whenever they chance to look at their own image in the mirror, find a ghastly beast staring back instead of the divine, beautiful image they had hoped and longed to see.


Sometimes, like Evan and Dorothea, we muster the courage to rebel at an early age. Sometimes, we do not. And when we do not, we begin to deflect away from the direction our internal compass is pointing to. We put on the wool of self-deception and appeasement-of-others over our eyes; we begin to see the world from the eyes of our parents and the people whom we have come to consider as our role model, and begin living our moments the way they deem fit. So we choose some vocation or some calling that they expect us to choose. Making this choice also means that we can count on their continuing support, and also to avoid entering into any ugly arguments. Or we rebel and then in a fit of defiance, we end up choosing something that came before us, without pausing to think whether it is really The One for us. Either way, we then wonder why we are not happy, why there is such violent turmoil. We wonder why it is that our existence on this planet Earth is not as joyous as what we were promised it would be before we arrived here. So, removing the wool from the eyes, synchronizing our goals with our internal compass, vanquishing the evil demons is the way to go. All metaphors, they. In reality, it is easier said than done, I know. That is why this exercise becomes so interesting!


Usually, when the inner calling has been discovered and the inner compass followed, life lived thus is full of satisfaction. It is not unusual to find material success manifesting in such lives, though this may not necessarily be so. If the criteria of having lived a successful life is being able to have the last breath leave one's body with a sigh of contentment accompanied by a realization of having lived a life without regret - and having done so, facing and welcoming death peacefully and with open arms... if this be the criteria, then a person who has lived their life fulfilling their core purpose and inner calling --- probably passes this criteria, hands down.