Chapter 1: Listening to Life
“Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. I must listen to my life and try to understand what it is truly about – quite apart from what I would like it to be about – or my life will never represent anything real in the world, no matter how earnest my intentions.”
“Vocation does not mean a goal that I pursue. It means a calling that I hear.”
“The difficulty is compounded by the fact that from our first days in school, we are taught to listen to everything and everyone but ourselves, to take all our clues about living from the people and powers around us… We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.”
- I think this is one of the mayor problems our society faces now a day. We are taking away the children’s creativity and trying to make them fit into a standardized model where they would probably won’t find what they are actually passionate for.
“Verbalizing is not the only way our lives speak, of course. They speak through our actions and reactions, our intuitions and instincts, our feelings and bodily states of being, perhaps more profoundly than through our words.”
- Difficult Conversations, Getting Real; know what you feel, recognize your emotions.
“My life is not only about my strengths and virtues; it is about my liabilities and my limits, my trespasses and my shadow.”
- Ground your identity (Difficult Conversations), know thyself (Self-Reliance)
“The soul speaks its truth only under quiet, inviting, and trustworthy conditions.”
- Walden
Other Notes about this book
This book is about finding your true vocation, your mission in this world, the meaning of your life.
(4/09/12)
It was Gene’s (Gene Kelly) passion for everything related to dancing. Dancing was his world, his life. It made me wonder if people could really find their true vocation and passion, as Parker Palmer’s book is about. I wonder how many people live without ever finding what’s their true vocation and only do what they think society think they should do, such as getting into college, finding a nice work that probably they don’t like but that pays enough to live well, creating a family, and settling for the rest of their life. What about what they like? Have they forgotten what is really their passion? Have they lost their creativity and settle with how the world “needs” them to be? Are they happy? Will they ever be happy? I don’t know any of those questions, but I certainly know that I don’t want to become one of them. I want to live every day of my life doing what I am passionate for. I want to explore my creativity, grow my intellect, and be really good at what I do, fulfilling my goals and dreams throughout my life.