I have not written much lately. I have wanted to, but I’m not sure how to focus on one thing. So much in my mind, more than I can easily parse.

It wouldn’t be so overwhelming if I weren’t caught in a cycle of obsession about my weight. I’ve been feeling fat lately. Not just a little fat, but incredibly fat. Fat like I won’t properly fit through doors or into chairs.

That type of feeling makes everything else harder to deal with. Harder to focus on. It makes me want to focus on detail, on structure, on organization, and not the substance of things. It makes it difficult to focus on doing work, and makes me want to create an environment in which doing the work will be optimal, healthy, easy.

It’s never that easy though. All the preparation is really just avoidance. All the work to make things easy to manage is a waste of time if nothing ever gets done. There are a whole lot of things that I want to get done, many of them just things that I want to write, that I never seem to have time for, particularly since I fill up so much of that time with work to prepare myself to do the things I want done.

Despite all that, I have been thinking a lot lately. About numerous topics.

HerbisOrbis and I have gotten into a few discussions about vocation, much about what I mentioned in a previous post. It’s an important discussion. One of the things that we didn’t discuss in detail, but that I will admit is interesting me quite a bit, is what exactly a vocation is.

We generally talk about vocation with a simple definition. A calling to service. That service is usually a service to the church, some would say to God/dess. But vocation is used in a broader sense. It is not inaccurate for a teacher to describe his or her work as a vocation. Or a research scientist or a doctor.

A vocation is really a defining attribute about the work we do. More importantly, it describes the reason a person does the work. You can be a teacher without having a vocation, just as you can be a priest or a nun or a doctor or a carpenter. No job requires a person with a vocation to fill it. Having a vocation simply means that your purpose, your reason for doing your job, is altruistic.

I’m not interested in getting into the altruism debate, for which there is no satisfactory stance other than to leave it alone. When you have a vocation, you do the work you do not because it helps you, but because something outside of yourself prompts you to do it. Some people describe it as a calling, as though someone or something outside of themselves is telling them to do this, to teach, to minister, to heal. The motive for your job is external to yourself.