Finding Our Calling

On Monday, I talked with my sister and learned that, after much deliberation, she has enrolled in vet tech school. This is very exciting news to me. For as long as I can remember, my sister has loved animals and wanted to work with them. For various reasons, she fell off course with that plan, bouncing between different career paths since starting college, and now she has finally ended up right back where she started.

Things like this always get me thinking about our true callings in life. For some people, it seems that their ambitions have always been clear to them. From childhood, they have charted a direct path towards fulfilling the career of their dreams (though I sometimes wonder if this path doesn't create itself in retrospect, rather than being clear from the beginning). I think such people are few and far between, but I always envy a bit those few who have always known what they wanted to do.

As someone with a host of things I feel passionate about, I've never been clear about my one true "calling." I do care deeply about social justice, and am very proud to be a social worker; I also, however, harbor ambitions of running my own business, and I dream of combining that with my love of organization and simplifying to become a professional organizer. Throughout high school and college, my teachers strongly encouraged me to pursue a career in writing (of the non-fiction variety; my creative writing is horrid!), and this is something I also dream about making a part of my career down the line. I suppose I should do professional organizing for people in need and then write about it. :)

However, all of these are rather recent ambitions of mine; they are not the things I dreamed about doing in my younger years. While I have always been (I think) a compassionate person, I never really thought of making a career out of social justice; and while I always enjoyed writing as a child, I only briefly (in middle school) thought about becoming a writer. Instead, the thing I most wanted to do for years and years was be in the performing arts. I loved dance and theatre, and I participated for years in both of them; to this day, I still feel deeply moved by all forms of art, but particularly those two.

My love for the performing arts still surfaces in me every time I see a show, or even when I just make it a point to be the center of attention on the dance floor at my holiday work party. :) But as much as I love the arts, in all honesty, that is no longer a dream I have for myself in terms of a career. This is true for practical reasons (it's too late in my life to consider that now, I know I don't have the talent that it takes, etc.), but mostly it's true because I no longer have the ambition for it. It's impossible for me to imagine myself in that life now, though it was the only thing that I wanted 10 years ago.

And so, this makes me wonder. . . do our dreams change, or do we just let them go? Have I simply taken on more practical and achievable ambitions, or have I matured beyond what I wanted years ago? Certainly, as we grow and change, the things that we want will grow and change. But it's hard to know if I'm getting closer to who I've been all along (the tender-hearted person who craves order), moving further away from who I really am (the girl who loves the spotlight), or becoming someone new altogether.

In the end, I don't know that it matters; right now, I feel satisfied with my current career and hopeful about the things I'd like to achieve down the road. And I don't know that there is one answer to who we "really are" and what our one "true calling" is; it seems much more natural that our ambitions should change as we learn more about ourselves and gather more experiences.

Though, as with my sister, sometimes our experiences take us right back to the beginning--and I'm sure that's a good feeling, too.