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If you’re bored with your work, does that mean you need to leave it or change it? Does falling in love with Someone Else signal that your marriage needs dissolution or attention? If you didn’t get the job, does that mean you weren’t supposed to pursue the career, or that the rejection is a test of your resolve?
Is a calling true if it’s propelled by a desire to prove something? If you’re afraid, does it suggest the need for courage and a leap of faith, or a backing-up and re-evaluation? And how do you know when you’re procrastinating or when the answer you seek simply hasn’t revealed itself to you yet?
The critical challenge of discernment—knowing whether your calls are true or false, knowing how and when to respond to them, knowing whether they even belong to you or not—requires that you tread a path between two essential questions: one, “What is right for me?” and two, “Where am I willing to be led?”
It also requires that you ask these two questions continually and devotedly, in hopes that by doing so Providence will eventually be alerted to your desires and answers will find you.
Our powers of discernment—of clarity—are routinely clouded by all manner of impulses, hankerings, emotions, ulterior motives, and intuitions that may be intuition or may be fear. Discerning means separating, so before you attempt to separate the true from the false, the gold from the fool’s gold, you have to do what juries do before reaching a verdict: pour over the evidence.
In discerning a call, you use your judgment. You evaluate something that speaks to you at so many different levels that clarifying it can seem only slightly less arduous than deciphering the Dead Sea scrolls. We're all judges, but few of us are good judges. Good judgment requires that you listen to all sides of a story and bear their tiresome debate. Good judgment requires understanding that the truth is not simple. Good judgment requires that you eventually reach a decision and act on it, which is perhaps the best way to practice discernment. Good judgment will occasionally have you up nights mainlining the serenity prayer.
But in searching for the truth of a calling, the meaning of a sign, the answer to the question of readiness, you can’t overlook a full accounting of facts and feelings just because you resent the truth its inconvenience, which is easy to do. Discernment is stringy, hard work. It’s also fallible. “Trying to define yourself,” the philosopher Alan Watts once said, “ is like trying to bite your own teeth.”
Once, during the question-and-answer period at the end of a lecture given by M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Travelled, I stood up and asked how, in struggling with an important personal decision, I'd know I was doing the right thing. Dr. Peck said the question was the single most common one he was asked and that “There is no such formula. The unconscious is always one step ahead of the conscious mind—the one that knows things—so it’s impossible to know for sure. But if you’re willing to sit with ambiguity, to accept uncertainties and contradictory meanings, then your unconscious will always be a step ahead of your conscious mind in the right direction. You’ll therefore do the right thing, though you won’t know it at the time.”
Uncertainty normally drives us daft, but although knowledge is power, not-knowing also has its own power—the power inherent in trusting yourself, relying on your intuitions, and being able to act even in the face of uncertainty.
The channels through which calls reveal themselves—whether dreams, symptoms, synchronicities, voices and visions, patterns, intuitions, accidents, even just the way events sometimes unfold—are like oracles of any kind. They aren’t meant to be treated as psychic vending machines, merely dispensing information. They're to be approached for dialogue, entered into in a spirit of co-respondence and what the novelist Eudora Welty called “the Geiger counter of the charged imagination.”
You imagine what your calls might mean, play with the possibilities, experiment and try them on for size, look to see if they fit, follow those that do and part with those that don’t. Try to avoid rushing a verdict just so you can get home in time for dinner.
For example: if you're contemplating whether to start up a new venture, and you find money on the sidewalk, is that a sign that you’re supposed to proceed, that your enterprise is now divinely sanctioned, or just that someone dropped a bunch of change on the street in pulling car keys from their pocket? And how would you even begin to guess without submitting this little shred of evidence to the skeptic and the wishful thinker in you, the head and the heart, the higher self, the lower self and the middle self?
If you feel you need to go back to school, do you really need the further education or are you simply casting about for a good excuse to avoid putting yourself on the line? Have you talked to someone who’s done what you want to do without that education, and someone else who’s done it with the education? And have you consulted the voices of fear and faith, the voices of time and mortality, and the voice of anyone who'd be directly affected by your decision?
There's no checklist against which you can test your callings with dead reckoning, much as you might desire it; no list of surefire ingredients for a “true” call. You can only try to make sense of signs by drawing lines between them, connecting the dots so that a pattern, a rough road map emerges.
That said, the truest calls seem to keep coming back, making their way to you through many different channels, so you can use this as a starting point. Make a tally of the signals you’ve been receiving around any given issue—through dreams, fantasies, cravings and ambitions, persistent symptoms, the fears and resistances that have been preoccupying you lately, the books that have been mysteriously making their way onto your night-table, any opportunity whose sudden appearance in your life borders on synchronicity, whatever people have been telling you a lot lately, what notes to yourself are tacked under fruit magnets on the refrigerator door. Then do the math. What, if anything, do these all add up to?
It might also help to define what in a calling you look for to test whether it’s the genuine article; to come up with something of a portrait, a mugshot. Think back on previous calls that panned out, and list them: the job you knew you should quit, and you were right; the relationship you waffled about committing to but which turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to you; the time you took a moral stand and felt tremendously empowered.
The point is: how did it feel to act on a calling? Did you feel more awake? Was there a kind of rightness to your actions and outcomes? Did you experience a flood of energy? Did you discover you had surprising forbearance for the mundane tasks involved in the undertaking, and that after a month or a year your enthusiasm didn’t falter? Did you feel gratitude? Did you experience gales of resistance to committing (which often indicates the importance of a call). Did your friends tell you they hadn't seen you that excited in ages?
While you’re at it, list those calls that didn’t pan out, and their attending signals. The most critical discernment skill, Peck insisted, is being able to distinguish between the sound of integrity in your life and the sound of its absence. In order to recognize a true call, you have to be able to recognize a false one, just as in order to spot a truth you have to be able to spot a lie.
Just keep in mind that a pursuit that doesn't strike oil doesn’t mean it lacks integrity or value. Maybe you learned something from the experience you hadn’t expected to learn. Maybe you were meant to try something and find it not to your liking, so you could cross it off your list once and for all. It’s important to know what you don’t want, too.
Maybe your “failures” are actually the path itself. How do you know, for instance, that the hit-and-run nature of your love life isn’t part of the unfolding of something you can’t even fathom at the moment? Maybe you’re called to continue leaving relationships because you’re going to be a marriage counselor someday and this is part of your training! It's not uncommon to hear people say, “If you had told me five years ago that today I'd be a marriage counselor (or a full-time artist, a father, living in Europe, not painting anymore, fill in the blank), I would have told you you were out of your mind.”
All this discernment, of course, requires patience, occasionally on the order of years. And not just patience, but active patience, using the time you have to submit the evidence you gather to the gut reaction of the body, the adjudication of the heart, the scrutiny of the mind, and the counsel of the spirit. It's about taking up the pickax and digging, chipping away a bit at a time at your questions and conundrums, or feeling your way like a bird that travels for thousands of miles guided only by instinct and the whisper of magnetism.
