What is calling?

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I’m contemplating the seasonality of life and the changing attitudes, mindsets, and directions with each season. My travels and adventures this last year made me reflect on what I should continue to carry with me – things, people, memories, opinions, attachments, ideas, hopes, and ambitions.

And to make these choices, I’ve had to ask myself, “Why? What am I packing for? What is calling me? What is life asking of me?” The last thing I want is to show up for a hike on a snowy mountain wearing a bathing suit, assuming that I am actually climbing the right mountain. Perhaps I should be dancing instead.

In his book Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer encourages us to ask: “What is life trying to do through me?” He suggests that calling isn’t something we invent—it’s something we uncover by paying attention to our gifts, the people we’re drawn to serve, and the moments that make us feel most alive. He suggests we listen inward instead of strategizing outward.

Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.

Joseph Campbell famously said, “Follow your bliss.” But he didn’t mean to indulge in fleeting pleasure. He meant to follow the thread of deep aliveness—the things that give you a sense of timelessness, absorption, and meaning. Your bliss might not be lucrative or linear. But as Campbell put it, “When you follow your bliss, doors will open where there were only walls.”

Of course, that assumes we’re willing to wander a little first.

Victor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that we don’t get to demand a purpose from life. Instead, we are the ones being questioned by life.

“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

Sometimes, your calling is less a “passion” and more a demand: something broken in the world that won’t leave you alone until you face it.

I’ve come to believe that a “calling” isn’t always about destiny in the mythic sense. Sometimes it’s subtler—a quiet insistence, a recurring tug, an idea you can’t seem to abandon. It’s not always glamorous. Often, it’s inconvenient. It doesn’t come with a banner or fanfare. Instead, it arrives disguised as restlessness, a curiosity that won’t quit, or a persistent ache to contribute something real.

We live in a culture obsessed with certainty, with five-year plans, and SMART goals, with figuring it all out by Tuesday. But the path of calling doesn’t work that way. We each have an inner compass—our own sense of integrity. When we live in alignment with it, things click. Even the hard stuff feels worth it. When we don’t, even the easy wins feel hollow.

And so, I return to the question: What is calling me now?

Not what called me five years ago. Not what looks good on paper. But what quietly insists that it’s mine. Maybe it’s a conversation I can’t stop thinking about. Maybe it’s the part of me that longs to create, to teach, to heal. Maybe it’s the kind of peace I feel when I stop performing and just dance.

I no longer believe your calling is one fixed thing. I think it evolves, like you. Like the seasons. There are chapters. Some are meant to be loud and expansive. Others ask you to go inward, to tend the soil of your own becoming. And not everything that calls you will stay. Some callings are stepping stones, not destinations.

You will recognize that important endeavor when you feel both terrified and pulled by the idea, when it asks something real of you, when you find the willingness to follow it, even if you don’t know where it leads.

Robert Greene, in his book Mastery, says that each of us has a “Life’s Task”—something uniquely suited to our nature. But contrary to what we might hope, this task rarely announces itself clearly. It begins as a vague sense, an inkling. Greene urges us to look backward and study the moments in childhood and adolescence when we felt most drawn to something and most absorbed. He calls these “primal inclinations,” and he insists they’re the compass. They point to a deeper current running beneath our lives all along.

“You possess a kind of inner force that seeks to guide you toward your Life’s Task—what you are meant to accomplish in the time that you have to live.”

But Greene doesn’t sell the fantasy that passion alone is enough. He warns, ignoring this force—if we chase prestige, money, or safety instead—we risk years of frustration. Our energy becomes misaligned, and our work becomes mechanical. We become what he calls “false selves,” living other people’s scripts. The antidote? Begin the process of deep observation. He says to treat your life like a map, noticing the patterns that show up when you are most curious, focused, and energized.

And then: commit. Not in a flashy, overnight way. But with a kind of slow, stubborn devotion. Greene reminds us that mastery isn’t a moment—it’s a path. One that begins with the courage to say: This is what I’m meant to explore. Even if it takes years. Even if no one gets it yet.

I’ve started to notice what makes me come alive and wonder what I dreamed of as a kid. Not just what I’m good at, or what earns praise, but what gives me that strange feeling of being completely present, like time has melted and I’m just… here. Fully here.

I remember myself as a 4-year-old standing on my tippytoes watching ballet on TV and wanting to be like the graceful shapes floating on stage. I liked ballroom dancing, too. All the costumes and drama hypnotized me. I grew up fascinated by how movement conveys a story and evokes mood. However, I never became a professional dancer because the script my mom instilled in me was that “no one in the family is musical,” so I shouldn’t waste my time. I still wasted my time dancing socially. Learning tango, salsa, bachata, and other forms of dance, and putting it all together into what feeds my soul on the dance floor. But is there something more I should be doing with this?

I ruined my eyesight reading adventure books under my blanket with a flashlight into the early morning hours. The librarian in town knew me, and every time I returned a book, she had another one picked out for me. Nope, none of them were on the required reading list. I couldn’t care less about our glorious communist leaders. I wanted to know about places and people who seemed too far from communist Bulgaria for me to ever visit. But I did. Was this just a season?

I’ve been asking people around me to share their earliest dreams and what they wanted to be when they grew up. It’s interesting to see how much of those dreams percolated into their lives. A NASCAR dream driver became a car mechanic, restoring and rebuilding cars. A writer-wanna-be who joined law enforcement eventually wrote a detective novel. A 7-year-old wanting to be a singer and a songwriter, becoming exactly that after many zigs and zags in life, but always staying music-adjacent.

So, I keep circling back to the question—not with urgency, but with tenderness:
What is calling me now?

Not forever. Not in bold neon letters. Just now. In this season.

Maybe it’s a whisper carried from childhood, from the pages of forbidden books or the music of bodies in motion. Maybe it’s something that hasn’t taken form yet, but is already living in my questions. Maybe it’s not about chasing a single path but honoring the parts of me that keep showing up—through books, through dance, through curiosity, through words.

Perhaps the calling is less about arriving and more about remembering. Returning. Re-membering—putting back together the parts that were once split off or silenced.

Calling doesn’t always announce itself with clarity. But it leaves traces. A breadcrumb trail of aliveness, wonder, restlessness, and ache. It lives in the things we can’t not do, the stories we keep telling, the obsessions we quietly nurture.

So I’ll keep listening. Watching. Noticing. I’ll pay attention to what draws me in and what makes me disappear into something bigger than myself. I’ll trust that, like the seasons, what is meant to bloom will do so in its own time.

And maybe that’s all we can really do: Listen for the quiet tug. Follow the warmth.

But it took me a year away, wandering around strange places, to switch on listening mode. I don’t believe I’ll know by Tuesday what I want to be in the next season of my life. No amount of SMART goal planning will bring me any closer to the answer. But I do believe I am on the yellow brick road to discovering the wisdom that’s hiding within.

I hope you are, too.

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Thank you again.

V