“Yeats once wrote that man is forced to choose between perfecting his life or his work. Yeats was wrong. It is only a matter of which comes first — your life or your work. If you are a stylist, the choice is as easy as it is obvious. Your life comes first. Then you inject it into your work. You bring what you are to what you do. Your job should bear the imprint of your personality, not vice versa.”     Quentin Crisp and Donald Carroll

“Try to forget yourself in the service of others. For when we think too much of ourselves and our own interests we easily become despondent. But when we work for others, our efforts return to bless us.”     Sidney Powell

Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life

Gregg Levoy

ISBN 0-609-80370-0

Amazon link

Service may come as a result of the callings that we may listen to and may make as the central theme of our life. Gregg Levoy has written about callings and includes this:

“Primarily this force announces the need for change, and the response for which calls is an awakening of some kind. A call is only a monologue. A return call, a response, creates a dialogue. Our own unfolding requires that we be in constant dialogue with whatever is calling us. The call and one’s response to it are also a central metaphor for the spiritual life.”

“They may be calls to do something (become self-employed, go back to school leave or start a relationship, move to the country, change careers, have a child) or calls to be something (more creative, less judgmental, more loving, less fearful). They may be calls toward something or away from something; calls to change something, review our commitment to it, or come back to it in an entirely new way; calls toward whatever we’ve dared and double-dared ourselves to do for as long as we can remember.”

“Saying yes to the calls tend to place you on a path that half of yourself thinks doesn’t make a bit of sense, but the other half knows that your life won’t make sense without.”

More links to continue readings about callings:

Five Blind Spots That Keep you From Seeing Your True Calling

Your Career is Not Luck

Can You Differentiate a Craving from a Calling?

The Masks of God

What if God Asked You to Take a Pay Cut?

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