Balloons, puzzle-pieces and finding your calling
Human beings are born with different capacities. If they are free, they are not equal. And if they are equal, they are not free.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Life is unfair isn’t it?
Sometimes it feels like the unfairness of life is staring us right in the face. And, for me, this unfairness raises all sorts of thorny, difficult questions about our calling.
I have friends who range the full gamet of human capabilities — I can think of friends who seem to have been born with strength and skill and natural apptitudes in nearly all areas of life. They inspire jealously in those around them with their confidence and success.
But I also have friends who have severe disabilities. Friends who were born with such physical limitations that they are in a wheelchair 24/7 without the use of their arms or legs, and require round-the-clock care to stay alive.
We can’t ignore the inherent unfairness of life: we are all born with different gifts, different capacities and capabilities.
But what I’ve noticed is that how we react to this unfairness changes everything. And if we think that some people are excluded from a life of purpose by their lack of privileges, then a funny thing happens. If we think that some people are excluded, we tend to include ourselves in that group, because there is always someone more fortunate than us who can act as our excuse.
It goes something like this: “They are so lucky. Life must be so easy for them. This is why life is so hard for me, and so it’s not worth trying.”
While thinking this through, it has become clear to me that there are two different ways that we can understand purpose, which radically change our attitude to finding it for ourselves.
Sometimes we look at purpose as if it’s the missing puzzle-piece in our lives.
We say to ourselves, “if I can just find that piece, then I’ll feel complete.”
And until we find that piece, we are left empty and longing for something more.
But in reality our experience of purpose is more like a balloon.
Imagine that you have just blown a first breath into a balloon. What would you say if I asked you: “is it full?”
And then you blow another breath into it. “Is it full now?”
And what about the third? The fourth?
The balloon is full. And then it gets fuller and fuller and fuller.
Our experience of purpose is much more like this.
We are all born with different sizes and shapes of balloons. What matters is not how big or impressive our balloon is. What matters is that we are meant to hold air. What matters is that we come alive when we find purpose, according to whatever capacity we have.
We are all born with different sizes and shapes of balloons, but we can all know and find purpose.
Aside from there being a strange kind of justice in this, it also leaves us with no more excuses to exclude ourselves from seeking out a calling of our own.
What are you waiting for?
Godspeed
TMo