When I was younger, the concept of a life-long vocation had never occurred to me. Maybe I had never heard of the concept or maybe I was just clueless, but it was nowhere on my radar. My radar was extremely short-sighted.
Having grown up a bit, I now believe that my perspective as a younger adult is not unusual. In my short life I couldn’t have grasped the idea of a lifelong vocation as distinct from my occupations. It is a concept that comes into focus later in life.
Steven Garber’s book, The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship and Work (highly recommended, especially for retirees) describes the difference between the words occupation and vocation:
The one is a word about the deepest things, the longer truths about each of us: what we care about, what motivates us, why we get up in the morning. The other word is about what we do day by day occupying particular responsibilities and relationships along the way as we live into our vocations. They aren’t the same word, and understanding that matters.
The Seamless Life: A Tapestry of Love & Learning, Worship and Work, p. 21
The longer we live the better we can live into our vocations. Ultimately, to use Garber’s title, we hope to live a seamless life, in which we are not patching together pieces - school, work, family life, spiritual growth, friends, volunteer commitments, hobbies, and play - but we find that those different efforts join to form a unique and seamless identity. Who you are. What motivates you. Why you get up in the morning.
In my younger years, I lived a patchwork life. The biggest patch was my work, from 9-5ish Monday through Friday. When I got home, I jumped to different patches: relationships, work around the house, hobbies, church, exercise, and volunteer work. I remember being thrilled when my husband and I had an evening when we didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything. They were rare; we had a lot of patches to juggle.
The advantage that the intervening years have given us is that we know ourselves better, we understand what motivates us and why we get up in the morning. Slowly, life becomes more seamless. I’m not sure it will ever be completely seamless, but it’s much closer now than it was when I was in my 30s.
Retirement is an opportunity to examine the patches and to weave a new tapestry of your life. It’s a tremendous gift for those who have decades of life experience and have the health to live another few decades.
Having thought of yourself in patches of work, home, and hobbies, it’s not unusual to have trouble making the shift to thinking about who you are as a whole. I am not a knitter, but if I were to learn the results would be a bit scary at first, but they would improve. Similarly, your tapestry doesn’t happen overnight, but it will become clear.
Ponder the idea of vocation. It may be related to your jobs, or it could be completely different. For example, a friend of mine told me about a woman who was an accountant but noticed that in every job she encountered a recovering alcoholic, and she helped them. When the individual was over the worst of it, there would be a reorganization, or she would go to a different job, and find a recovering alcoholic. She realized that her vocation was to assist recovering alcoholics. She wouldn’t have understood that at a young age. She needed years and experiences to recognize her vocation.
Vocation, in its broadest sense, encompasses every role that a person has in his or her life. Your vocation is created by the roles you play and the actions you take, which can range from a job to family life, or from being active in a community to taking time for yourself.
Something that arises from within.
Let it arise from within.
We need to experience ups and downs, different types of work, paid and unpaid, discover what we enjoyed, what kinds of work energized us, what kinds of work depleted us, and take in all of life. Some may understand their vocation at an early age, but most of us need time.
A knitted tapestry has patterns, colors, interest, but it doesn’t have seams. Your job may be the strongest color in your tapestry, or perhaps its relationships, volunteer efforts or hobbies, and some of them will blend together. Throughout your life, you are arranging them into a beautiful mosaic.
But it’s not finished. Retirement is a time of life when we can look back over our decades of work with a bit of objectivity and make tapestries out of our patchwork lives. Metaphorically, we will learn to knit.
Our finished tapestries will speak of our vocations.
Photo by Erik Mclean on Unsplash
Photo by Lauren bova on Unsplash
Thank you for this thoughtful post, Judy. I love the metaphor of a tapestry. My hands can’t knit a stitch, but in my life, I’m still knitting, and hopefully not dropping too many stitches. Thank you for this.