From Curiosity to Calling
Whatever you are passionate about, try to trace the origins. As you connect the dots, you’ll find yourself nodding your head, realizing you were hardwired for this very thing.
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“Did you study to be a writer in college?” a friend asked me over lunch one day.
“No, but I did take a poetry class that interested me. And then I started writing poetry and song lyrics. Once I entered the corporate world, I wrote policy manuals. And … wow. I guess I should have realized I was a writer long before I did. I just didn’t have anybody to help me see that.”
My journey toward the written word was meandering and lengthy. The direction I was headed should have led to an obvious destination. But life rarely works that way.
My parents divorced when I was eight, which meant Dad moved out. He picked my sister and me up on Saturdays for visitation. He owned a small commercial painting company and would often take us to his shop to do a little paperwork before we headed out for the rest of the day.
His manual typewriter fascinated me. The thing probably weighed fifty pounds. It didn’t take me long before I inserted paper and started typing. I just needed to see words appear on the page. I once took the liner notes from an Elvis album and typed them while he worked.
Shortly thereafter, I started writing and illustrating a comic book about “Bird Man’s” adventures. Not exactly original but hey, I was like nine years old. I sold those issues to my little sister for a nickel. I loved escaping into Bird Man’s fictitious world. I had control there, unlike in the rest of my world after my parents divorced.
When I was in high school, I had an English teacher named Mr. Martin. He read some of my writing early on and convinced me that I could write, saying I had natural talent. That led to me writing angsty stuff about girls.
As I thought about college, I had no idea what to study. A career aptitude test directed me toward business management, so I pursued it wholeheartedly.
And I hated nearly every minute of it.
The accounting class frustrated me to the point of wanting to pull my hair out, as I struggled to balance the columns. And the computer programming class was maddening too. I couldn't grasp the flow charts and programming language.
I realize now that I’m right-brained with analytical tendencies, so I couldn’t sit still for all this left-brained activity without at least dabbling in some creative endeavor.
As I mentioned, I took a poetry class as an elective, and that resonated with me. The passion behind the words connected with me. I didn’t always understand what I read but hearing the professor and other students offering their insights and suggestions jumpstarted my own creativity as I sought meaning in the prose.
At about that same time, I experienced some angsty relationship starts and stops. As a shy, overweight young person, I didn’t know how to process that.
Then words began to spill out of me. I wrote poems, then songs to express how I felt. The lyrics of some of those songs are still burned into my brain. And while my mind went to some dark places, just getting the words down on the page gave me the release I needed.
Here’s a taste of one such song.
I used to think it all mattered
Now all that matters is the end
Ending it all would be too easy
But I’ve just lost my only friend
Such an awful state of mind
But I’m used to feeling low
I’m so lost
It’s the only feeling that I know
I didn’t contemplate suicide but I needed to say these words – sing these words so I could drag them out of the darkness and into the light. And once they were exposed to the light, they withered and died.
I think this awakened my understanding of the power of the written word. I’d always been bookish, so inherently, I knew this already but now I actually felt it.
When I entered the corporate world in my twenties, I worked for a life insurance company, processing policy changes (changing face amounts, beneficiates and various other things). Most of my duties consisted of typing endorsements to reflect those policy changes, then mailing those documents to agents.
As the years rolled by, I gained an expert understanding of the process, and when we started talking about automation, I wrote a policy manual that won all sorts of praise. It amazed me that people found it helpful to read a structured outline of how to process a policy change.
It seems obvious now that I had a bent toward writing. I’ll never win a Pulitzer, but I had a knack for systematizing what I knew and presenting it in a way that helped people understand.
During these years, I discovered nightclubs. More importantly, live music in those nightclubs. The lyrics of many of those songs told me I wasn’t alone in not getting what I wanted. And I started to befriend some of the touring band members, going so far as to share some of my songs with them. I’m not sure my songs were good. In fact, I’m pretty sure they weren’t. But they helped me process what felt so elusive – love.
After the life insurance company moved to Chicago, I took a job as a data entry clerk in a bank. While working there, I received a postcard in the mail that invited me to a writers' conference. On a whim, I signed up and paid the fee.
As I sat under the teaching of novelist Nancy Moser on that first day, I felt like I belonged. Dozens of other people who were in attendance were just like me. I wanted more, so I kept attending.
Two years later, as a result of a connection I made at that conference, “Decision” magazine published my first article. In hindsight, it seems pretty crazy to have your first article appear in Billy Graham’s magazine.
After that, I started writing for magazines and eventually newspapers. The funny thing is, I never connected the throughline until that day when my buddy asked me if I studied to be a writer in college.
Your throughline might not be writing. It might be engineering or fitness or graphic design. It might not even be related to work. Maybe it’s missions, grandparenting or sewing. Whatever you are passionate about, try to trace the origins. As you connect the dots, you’ll find yourself nodding your head, realizing you were hardwired for this very thing.
Consider the following questions:
What did you gravitate toward when you were young?
Has that desire or longing lessened over the years?
How many variations of that activity appear in your history?
Do you feel passionate about something right now but fearful of pursuing it?
Has somebody talked you out of pursuing it?
Have you talked yourself out of pursuing it?
It’s not too late.
I didn’t start writing commercially until I was in my mid-thirties. And I didn’t release my first book until I was thirty-nine. I know many authors who started even later. It’s not about your age; it’s about your mindset.
Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote, “Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.”
You get one life. Pursue your calling … because it matters.
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When Lee isn’t writing essays, devotional books, or Christmas novellas, he is a freelance editor, as well as a freelance journalist who has written hundreds of articles for various newspapers and magazines. He’s also a fan of NASCAR, baseball, tennis, books, movies and coffee shops. If you haven’t read his books, give one a try.