Honor the Difference between Job, Duty, and Calling

Do we have a duty to duty? Yes, of course. To our jobs, for example, or a duty to our partners? Yes, again. Do we have a duty to calling? Also, yes. But what is the difference, and how do we tell them apart?

Put simply, jobs are how we earn our daily bread. We need jobs to pay the bills, support ourselves and others, and contribute to our world. I have cut grass, worked in the stockroom of a grocery, on an assembly line for a magnificent income of $1.75 per hour, cleaned houses for about $4 per hour, taught English to foreigners, and been a professor in a university, a professional writer, speaker, teacher, and psychoanalyst. The job of working on an assembly line many moons ago helped me learn how machines work, how assembly lines work, and, more importantly, how most men and women have to spend their lives, among them my good father. The jobs of cleaning houses and teaching English to foreigners occurred when I was a foreigner in someone else’s country, sometimes working under the table and grateful to get cash to finance my studies and analytic hours. From them I learned the skills of survival, of counting pennies, and of discipline.

Duty is where we acknowledge the legitimate claim that others make upon us. Duty is how we keep our society going. I have enormous admiration for those who rise in the morning and, aching in body and spirit, go off to work, perhaps leading Thoreau’s “lives of quiet desperation,” but nonetheless support themselves and those in their care. I am grateful for the souls running the buses that go down my street, for the fire, police, and civil servants who stand ready to help any of us at any time. I am grateful to the people who clean up our garbage, plow the snow off our streets, and keep all the systems running. I think of them every day in gratitude as we pass each other on the way to work. And I think of the elderly and the infirm, no longer capable of work, and thank them for reflecting on their lives and adding to the sum of what community really is. All of them are doing their duty.

In Creating a Life, I wrote of John Fowles’s marvelous novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, set in the middle of the high Victorian era, when modernism bumped up against, eroded, and undermined the certainties of earlier times. In it, the central character is a conscientious man who is both a believer in his religious heritage and betrothed to a young woman aptly named Ernestina (“little Ernestness”). He is also a member of a new and emerging profession, geology. As he is exposed to the new fossil research that clearly undermines the certainties of his tradition — with its fanciful yet long-revered literal interpretations of scripture — and posits a world far earlier, beyond, and quite more complex than his tradition wishes to ratify, he is thrust into a conflict of duty. He has a duty to his religious values, and he has a duty to his professional calling as a scientist. What to do?

This dilemma is intensified by his encounter with a woman of suspect reputation with whom he falls in love. He is bound to his duty to Ernestina and bound to the binding legal contract that betrothal then meant. Breaking such a contract made him subject to legal sanction and worse, public calumniation and exile. What to do?

In the choice between A and B, where each lays legitimate claim upon our duty, the third embodies the discernment of which choice summons us to a more developmental journey. Thus, for example, many fine folks feel honor bound to see to their parent’s well-being, and well they should. However, many times this duty is an old complex that produces an inordinate amount of anxiety construed as guilt, as we saw earlier in this book. Sometimes the price of the parent-child nexus is so costly, the atmosphere so toxic, that the child has to walk away to save his or her life. Sometimes the child-cum-adult has to walk away to secure his or her own journey when the parent narcissistically demands and guilts the child into submission.

When we figure soul into the mix with job and duty, we then raise the question of vocation. Vocation derives from the Latin vocatus, meaning “calling” or “to be called.” Ego consciousness does not do the calling; rather, the ego, the whole person, is called. Called by what? God, nature, the soul? Use the metaphor you prefer. Called means that that ego consciousness, fragile and frangible, nervous and driven, fixed or flowing as it is in any moment, lives at all hours in a larger context. Part of what it means to be an emergent adult is to realize both the tiny place our ego holds, like a fragile cork floating on a tenebrous sea, and the immense summons to which it is accountable. The ego is, after all, obliged to make choices every hour, whipsawed as it often is between competing force fields. All of our systems, our ethics, our jurisprudence, and our moral visions hold ego consciousness accountable for whatever spills into the world, even when it comes from our unconscious. I cannot say to the judge, “That came from my unconscious, and therefore I am not responsible.” No civilized system permits us to get away with that slippery ploy. So we remain accountable to the world, to our daily life, to each other, and to our own soul. Sometimes these disparate claims upon us are in accord, and other times they occasion enormous suffering to us.

Vocation is our duty to our calling. In some cases, individuals are fortunate to bring together job and duty and calling in a unified form. I am one of those fortunate individuals, and while it was not always the case in my history, it has been for many years now. Every day I am grateful for that. My job of earning a living, my duty to contribute to the world in which I live, and my vocation to be a teacher in the sundry forums of classroom, book, and therapy are one, a seamless web, most of the time. I never forget that privilege afforded to me by having been born in a time when a poor child might through dint of education and persistence work to create a life much more satisfying than that experienced by his or her predecessors. Most of humanity has not had this opportunity.

Most of us will not live such dramatic lives, yet every day we are called to decide what kind of human being we will be. We don’t have to think very much, really. We can just let our daily legitimate duties carry us. We can let our acquired complexes unfold their historically generated programs for us, and generally, we will fit in, be missed when we pass, and contribute whatever we were duty bound to produce, though we will never have stood in the presence of the large.

Individuation is not about bold deeds on the large canvas of history, at least not for most of us. Individuation might actually be much more difficult than that. Individuation may be simply trying to show up as ourselves more days than not. All we are asked to do by history, the gods, nature, or by fate — whichever metaphor you prefer — is to show up as who we really are. Who we really are is not meant to fit in, be normal, imitate someone else’s life. After all, that has already been done, so why repeat it? Individuation is the summons to grow up, to achieve personhood, to be a mensch.