wait for the call

I don't know if I believe I have a calling any more. I think some people are called to do something specific, at least in terms of their life's work, but obviously not everyone is. I guess you can argue that everyone has one and some people just never find or heed theirs. Like all these sorts of hypothetical absolutes, though, all sorts of troubling real-world concerns come up when you try to apply the categorical imperative (who's going to clean all the toilets?).

When I graduated from high school my biology teacher wrote something in the card he gave me to the effect that a person as smart as I was had an obligation to contribute something to the world. Such thoughts haunt me now, but at the time I just considered it foregone conclusion that I would go to the magic halls of learning and be exposed to all the far-out truth and the Path Would Become Plain. It occurs to me as I write this that I have really staked out college in my mind as the territory where this shift occured, and I would probably do well to somehow expurgate whatever hang-ups I'm managing to have left about those four years after a good 12 more have passed. Still: I can say that college was the last time I had that feeling - confidence, you might say, that that call was coming, inevitable.

But really what has it done for me? Today I was checking out the new central library, and I was browsing the whole "how to choose a career" section, and it just made me sick to even think of reading any of these books, well-intentioned though they may be. I've read so many books. But what book can tell you an answer that doesn't exist? You have to consider that possibility. Maybe some people are just wired that way and others are not.

In any event, today I felt like establishing my independence from it. I've second guessed my decisions enough trying to spot the Path hiding in the thickets of real life. Maybe there is no future, no goals, no Proper Place. Maybe it really all is just the moment we are in, and what we are, in it.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.