“Why do musicians compose symphonies and poets write poems? They do it because life wouldn’t have any meaning for them if they didn’t. That’s why I draw cartoons. It’s my life." Charles Schulz
Our
calling engages our passions. When we come to the path that makes sense for us,
there is an inner yes that resonates and energizes. Clearly this is not always
easy—because often the path has difficulties—but, at the same time, it’s not
toilsome because it’s the right path. And that rightness brings with it energy
and creativity. There’s an inner drive that leads us to change the world for
the better.
The well-known author and pastor Frederick
Buechner describes the right calling, hearing our yeses, as a beautiful duet of
voices.
The kind of work God usually calls you to is the kind of work (a) that you need most to do and (b) that the world most needs to have done…. Neither the hair shirt nor the soft berth will do. The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC
Buechner
uses the term “work,” but I will replace this with “calling,” which arises at
an amazing intersection of personal interest and external need.
With Buechner in mind, I’m going to change
this slightly and phrase it more succinctly:
Our yes is where passion meets mission.
It’s where what we want most to do
coincides with what God wants done in the world. It’s that itch we have to
scratch. What we “need most to do” in Buechner’s definition reminds us that
there is something (or perhaps a few things) that we “most need to do,” that
has in it an inner “yes.”
But how do we know what we really care about? What
does the experience of finding your passion feel like?
This brings
me to a psychologist with a remarkable name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (For what
it’s worth, I once heard someone comment that he prefers “Mike” and that his
last name sounds something like “Chick-sent-me-high-ee.”) In his book Flow: The
Psychology of Optimal Experience,
Csikszentmihalyi presented a key idea for grasping how we find our passion. In
the state of the mind he named “flow,” we experience deep enjoyment, challenge
matched by our skills, creativity, and a sense that time is moving in a
different, and fuller, way. How can “flow”—or “optimal experience”—be
described?
“‘Flow’ is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
One key
example for Csikszentmihalyi is the work of a surgeon, who operates within
certain limits (defined by keeping the patient alive), for a specific goal (the
improved health of the patient), with a task that's entirely demanding and
rewarding. Although paradigmatic, surgeons don’t exhaust the experience of flow.
In fact, flow is actually a reasonably universal experience.
But how did
he find this out? He developed a new form of research, the Experience Sampling
Method, in which hundreds of subjects wore pagers that beeped at odd intervals
throughout their days. When paged, the participants had to quickly fill out a
brief survey that noted what activity they were engaged in and a series of
questions of whether they were more or less in the “flow.” Were they in
“optimal experience”?
Csikszentmihalyi’s research indicates some
surprising results: for example, human beings experience flow more often when
they are working than when they are at leisure. In fact, 54% of the
participants who were “in flow” were paged at work. And although television
requires mental processing, very little else mentally, like memory, is engaged.
“Not surprisingly, people report some of the lowest levels of concentration,
use of skills, clarity of thought, and feelings of potency when watching
television.”
Ultimately, he asserts, optimal experience
makes life worth living. When we’re in the flow, we want to do nothing else.
And we don’t really care about much else.
“An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult, or dangerous." Csikszentmihalyi.
So if your “pager” beeped right now, would
you be “in flow”? Take some notes throughout this week at random intervals and
see when you’re in optimal experience, whether you’d keep doing that activity
and “are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they
will get out of it.” As the fabulous book Designing Your Life reminds us, it may take some "trialing" or testing--which is the theme of the next section--to find your passions. Still, the key for this post is that your passions will
lead you to yes.
