Not Oprah’s Book Club: Let Your Life Speak

I’m reading an amazing little book by one of my new favorite authors, Parker Palmer (see my review of The Courage to Teach from a couple of weeks ago). This one’s called Let Your Life Speak and in it he explores how one truly finds a vocation, a calling, a purpose in life. He writes:

Some journeys are direct, and some are circuitous; some are heroic, and some are fearful and muddled. But every journey, honestly undertaken, stands a chance of taking us toward the place where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.

He traces his own “deep gladness� back to childhood when he used to write little booklets about aviation. At the time he interpreted it as a sign that he should become a pilot, when really it was his first incarnation of becoming an author.
Two childhood memories popped into my head…1) lying on the cold, tile kitchen floor, holding my mom’s toes while she talked on the phone to her friends, listening to their stories and the way she consoled them and 2) setting my stuffed animals up in a group and then reading to them aloud, careful to show them the pictures when I turned the pages very patiently and deliberately. What did I become? A professional eavesdropper (i.e. writer) and a teacher.
Watching his granddaughter, Parker writes:

She did not show up as raw material to be shaped into whatever image the world might want her to take. She arrived with her own gifted form, with the shape of her own sacred soul. Biblical faith calls it the image of God in which we are all created. Thomas Merton calls it true self. Quakers call it the inner light, or “that of God� in every person. The humanist tradition calls it identity and integrity. No matter what you call it, it is a pearl of great price.

So today, I ask you, where does your “deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?â€? What is your “pearl of great price?â€? I think these questions are particularly important in a society that still clings to inauthentic gender norms, especially when it comes to career. If you were neither man nor woman, if you didn’t get caught up in “shoulds” or “oughts”, if you had a break from economic fears…who would you be?
Next week: some literary take on the Women, Action, & Media conference and the week after, Complications by by Atul Gawande