Maybe I've been doing this all wrong

Ambition vs. vocation

Sep 12, 2022

Do you ever have one of those moments when the exact right words reach you at the exact right moment in your life? That’s what happened to me with David Whyte’s book, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Meaning of Everyday Words. It’s an encyclopedia of insight. I got as far as the A’s and I was shook.

“Ambition,” Whyte writes, “is desire frozen…” And, “Ambition is a word that lacks any ambition.” And, “The ease of having an ambition is that it can be easily explained to others; the very disease of ambition is that it can so easily be explained to others.”

Or to sum up—ambition is okay-ish for the young, but with age and wisdom, we should know better. Ouch.

Now I’ve thought about ambition quite a bit. My husband will joke that ambition is something he should have had, but didn’t (he’s clearly ahead of the game). I have never had ambitions in my day job. Well, mostly not. There might have been moments when I was young when I dreamt of being that Big Wig sociologist at the big national conference. The kind I told stories about riding in the elevator with afterwards, my brush with greatness.

But as soon as I realized what it took to be that Big Wig scholar, my ambition was gone. Doing research and writing academic articles was not for me.

The teaching part of my job is hard to have ambitions about. Like I wrote last week, teaching is a slow game. Maybe you can want to win all the awards, but there aren’t many of them, seeing as we don’t much value teaching in our culture.

Teaching has always been what Whyte says is the wiser path than ambition—a vocation. Teaching is part of my life’s work. It’s a source of meaning and purpose. It grounds me in the messiness of the universe. When I’m doing it well, it centers compassion. That’s vocation.

Leaving behind ambition as a professor is easy. As a writer? Not so much.

I want to publish a novel. This is a desire that runs deep. It is, clearly, an ambition. Easily explained to others. It is, as Whyte says, “the current of a vocational life immobilized and over-concretized to set, unforgiving goals.”

I want to publish a novel, the traditional way, which means an agent, one of the Big Five publishers (soon to be four, maybe?). I want that specific validation. I want this because in my head, anything else feels second-rate. Tainted. I want my book on bookshelves and the deal announced in Publishers Weekly and, yeah, maybe a couple nice reviews.

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This is an ambition. A desire frozen. It’s not a vocation. It’s a desire to win at a game I know is rigged. It’s more than a little misguided. It’s my white whale, which is probably the ultimate manifestation of ambition gone wrong. Why is it so important for Ahab to kill Moby Dick? He can hardly remember anymore. It just is. Desire frozen.

grayscale photo of sea waves — Photo by Patrick Hendry on Unsplash

I want to write a novel because stories have saved me, over and over again. I would like to repay that debt back to the world, to maybe be someone else’s life preserver. I want to write a novel because it can create a brief moment of meaning out of the chaos. A moment when the good folks win. Because stories can be life made so beautiful it hurts, like a flashlight shone into the darkness. I want to write a novel because stories about small towns in Indiana matter, too, and they deserve to be heard.

That is all vocation and note that none of it requires that the novel be published in a traditional way. It only requires the writing and the sharing with the world, which in 2022, can be done in so many different ways.

I’m not going to lie to you. Ambition is hard to get go of. This ambition is hard for me to let go of. I have a stubbornness at my core that does not want to give up. That stubbornness believes that giving up is weak. Giving up is failure.

But what if it’s not giving up, but letting go of something I’ve been holding onto too tightly and for too long? We all know that’s never a good thing. What else might I be able to pick up if I let go? What might I discover in the free fall?

“A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones, onto which we calmly place our feet..” Oh, how many times have I wished getting a novel published were like that?

But no, Whyte writes, a life’s work is “more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, in conversation with the elements.” On that path, there’s every chance you might get lost from time to time.

A vocation, Whyte says, “is a conversation between our physical bodies, our work, our intellects and imaginations.” It always includes “the specific, heartrending way we will fail at our attempt to live fully. A true vocation always metamorphoses both ambition and failure into compassion and understanding for others.” And that’s better than a published novel any day, right?

You Think Too Much

Maybe I've been doing this all wrong

Ambition vs. vocation

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