Craft & Calling; the Quest for Belonging
The Invitation and Courtship of Purpose, Calling and Belonging.
The Secret Wisdom of Words
We never get taught the wisdom or the knack of probing everyday words for their deeper meanings. It is a craft and calling in of itself, a journey with no bottom. We ascribe to words only the surface meaning that we live with. When we explore the alternative and deeper meanings hidden in everyday words, creases of meaning are formed when we try and fold these together with our existing ideas of what they mean. In those creases are hidden secret invitations to pause and allow space for deep reflection to encounter the surprising way the truth of it touches our own.
This entire article is just such an exploration of words and the origami swans of beauty and meaning they form when given their due space.
In that spirit, we begin with the following invitation. How curious and how wonderful that ‘ship’ and ‘craft’ carry so many significant threads of meaning and context between them.
‘Ship’, as in courtship or relationship, comes to us via the root languages which branched into Dutch, German and English. Dutch -schap and German -schaft, mean “to create, or appoint”, or “to form” and “to shape”. When we place it at the end of other words we get ideas like ownership, apprenticeship, craftsmanship and leadership. It always implies something is being shaped by the circumstance the word implies. It always implies appointment to a form of accountability and belonging.
To craft something is to shape it, but ‘craft’ is also the word used to describe the vehicle or vessel we undertake our journeys of transformation and arrival in. We embark on and pursue our journeys in life not only to reach the destination but also to be changed by the journey along the way. We realise only later that our initial intended destinations were so much less inspired than we imagined them to be at the start, and that part of the notion of “destination”, is related to a destiny—the arrival of the person that we become through the transformational power of our journeys. The ‘crafts’ and ‘ships’ we commit ourselves to, become our vehicles of transformation.
This is true for apprenticeships and relationships. Some ships we have very little power to steer, such as kinship or citizenship. The notion of Fate refers to the way we arrive into a life, belonging to a certain time and place, over which we have little choice. This arrival is what determines the language we grow up speaking and defines everything about the shape of our lives that we did not choose.
Later on, as we grow up and begin to discover ourselves, as our own truth emerges, we realise we have problems, or incompatibilities of values and beliefs, with the power brokers of our citizenship. This is when young people are ideologically awakened, into rebelling from the belief systems of their families or become politically active as they begin working out how they might express their unfolding understanding of their own generation and how they might seek to affect change.
In the world we live in today, some people can change their citizenship, or can even hold dual citizenship, they can migrate to other countries and thereby change the shape of the Fate that their children and future selves will inherit.
On the other hand, other people are stuck, unable to leave, unable to choose which shaping they want for themselves and their children. On the other side of that same coin, there are people whose circumstances are made so poor through war or famine, that they are forced to leave the land of their birth without a plan, in the hopes of finding refuge somewhere else in the world. In one way, all people share a common fate by being alive at this time, but in another way, they have very different fates, depending on the circumstances of the place they were born.
We often hear people say “We are all in the same boat together”. The most generous version of this is meant as consolation to those facing circumstances of troubling change together. For some, they find comfort in the notion that they are not the only ones caught in their predicament and it reminds them that there is a kin-ship of sorts in which they can find some refuge. This statement of being in the same boat makes a circle of the people who share the trouble and makes possible new pathways of connection and belonging.
“A lot of the alienation that comes from the sense of being ‘other’, in a culture, comes from a certain veil of visibility, that eclipses from view all other people who are also ‘other’, who are sorrowing with kindred sorrows, and conflicted with kindred conflicts, who are refugees from their own nature.”
Maria Popova
For others, these same words about being in the same boat, actually achieve the precise opposite of consolation, adding insult to injury, or salt to the wound. Even in the same boat, not all share the same class or rank. The slave rowers in Roman galleys were chained to the oar benches in cramped and stifling quarters, while the soldiers and passengers were free to move about in the sunshine and fresh air. They ate different meals, drank from different cups and enjoyed very different fates in one sense. The captain of the ship enjoyed the highest privilege of all including the finest food and the finest cabin. Interestingly, in the event of the ship ever sinking, the captain was either the last to leave or out of a profound sense of belonging to their role and the duties these implied, did not leave at all. In a way, the captain was not just the master of the ship, but someone who considered their own fate to be tied to that of the ship.
Either way, even in the same boat, we are never all in the same boat, and being told so, when you know your fate, the way shared troubles affect us differently to someone else, the differences in recourse each has to ever change that is an aspect of fate people refer to as privilege and disadvantage. The words privilege and advantage, come from root words which mean ‘endowment’ and ‘profit’, respectively. Privilege, to the one that does not have it, always seems like an unfair blessing bestowed on one person while being denied to another. Profit, is not always the outcome of skill or effort alone. Two people may make the same transaction, and given the nature of relativity and change, may reap different profits yielded from the the same investment. Disadvantage, to the one that does not have to endure it, is more easily ascribed to poor choices in the one that does. In the lottery of life, all of us have mixtures and combinations of endowments and handicaps. When we struggle with a circumstance that others struggle less with or do not seem to struggle with at all, we can be more inclined to notice how someone else enjoys a relative privilege, and less inclined to consider the relationship between our circumstance and the choices we made or avoided, which chain ‘us’ to the oars, while ‘they’ swan about on deck. Conversely, when we encounter others struggling with a circumstance that we do not, we can find ourselves more inclined to ascribe the difference in experience between the two, to the quality and wisdom of their earlier choices, and less to the circumstances of good fortune that we were perhaps granted. The act of putting oneself in someone else’s shoes requires as much generosity of spirit as it does curiosity. Generosity and curiosity are the parents of appreciation, without which we become unlikely to form any awareness of exactly how we were not forced to make the choices ‘they’ were. Without appreciation, our empathy is lessened and without empathy, our sense of connection and belonging is diminished. The absence of connection and belonging is what turns invents the bright light that divides everything into ‘self’ and ‘other’, or us and them. We compare only our circumstances of present moment outcome not our circumstances of arrival in that present moment saying “Look at how privileged they are” and “Look at how foolish they are”.
We are all someone else’s ‘they’.
Even in the same boat, we are never exactly all in the same boat, which is from where we derive our sense of injustice and also fatalism in the world. Injustice is a belief not only that something wrong has happened, but that whatever is responsible in this life for making us whole, not only failed us but was also deaf to our plight. The real sting of injustice is not the unfairness, but the indifference.
Even if we are not the person who is wronged directly, we can feel wronged, suffering the sting of injustice by having a cause we care for, be neglected and ignored. Fatalism is the belief that everything that happens is predetermined and inevitable. Fatalism is born out of noticing that some things in life are determined for us before we arrive, more often than not being things beyond our limits to change or control. In one sense, fatalism is very pragmatic, facing the cold hard facts of reality as they are. In another sense, fatalism is a form of imagination, albeit a very negative one, wherein one imagines insurmountable obstacles and undefiable limits where there might be none. In this way, a fatalist accepts the world as they see it, but are also disinclined to believe change, renewal and growth are possible. Fatalism does most of its harm not only this way, discounting any merit in attempting to defy the bounds of its limitations and circumstances, but in how it regards as pointless anyone else’s efforts or wishes to defy them as well.
Fatalism—and this is true for certain species of pragmatism and equanimity—consigns not only to the smallness of what is but becomes complicit in robbing everything and everyone else of the chance of greatness of what could be.
Realising we are not all in the same boat causes some the enduring sting of injustice, eager to determine who should shoulder the burden of blame, and to others, it is the blade of fatalism that cleaves the hamstrings of hope and meaning. Where injustice seeks to find who should be bound to the law and be ushered towards their “just” fate, fatalism regards everyone as bound equally to the law of fate and thereby equally exempt from liability.
In the modern world we live in, the mutual existence of injustice and fatalism is inevitable. In relationship to each other, these two naturally make very bad bedfellows, given that they have completely different schools of bookkeeping.
Injustice is a preoccupation with liability, concerned more with the settling of the score than the reconciliation of the books, whereas Fatalism always counting what is missing as lost, is the cancelling of the debt of liability altogether.
In the image of our sinking ship, even two slaves chained beside one another to the same rowing bench would not be having the same experience. In the same way, all human beings can feel chained to our circumstances of thankless, endless toil, starved of meaning, utterly divorced from our sense of purpose in life. It can be both true that one person at the oar bench might have a fierce will to live, fueled by a sense of injustice of having their liberty and power taken away, whereas the other has little motivation to go on living, considering the poorness of their lot in life and the acceptance of it which they arrived at as the only way left them to make sense of what would otherwise sting like an incurable injury to their soul.
In each case we have touched on, the captain is bound to his fate through calling, and the unhappy souls chained to the oar bench, are all “in the same boat”, but their relationship with fate is very different, and all of this turns on an invisible fulcrum which we call Belonging.
Sailors have always been used as metaphors for the archetypal projects of navigating, discovery, and journeying—which we relate to the wanderlust of the human spirit and the undertakings we risk in its pursuit. In this context, it cannot be said that the sailor chooses to languish adrift far from shore any less than they choose to face wild storms and death by drowning. We understand that in the call to adventure and the way they define belonging as a relationship with a certain kind of freedom, they accept these as the risks they are liable for in their pursuit of purpose.
The captain does not choose to go down with the ship—it is more accurate to say that they choose the craft and calling of a captain along with which goes a form of belonging to their ship. The captain’s hat belongs to the captain as much as the captain belongs to the privileges and responsibilities that belong to that hat. The ship belongs to the captain as much as the captain belongs to the ship, and ultimately both belong to the fate of the other. The fate of the ship is determined by where the captain determines to sail it, and the level of care that is invested along the way. The fate of the captain is determined by the fate of the ship.
Craft & Calling
As young people, when we first wake up to the question of where we will find our meaning and our sense of purpose in life, we are initially confronted with the way we belong to a fate that we did not choose. As a culture where we used to have guilds and crafts, we now have professions. In earlier times, the word ‘profession’ used to refer to the vows taken, or professed, by a person answering their calling to enter into a religious order. I have written earlier on the power of vows as covenants of our devotions, which would be worth a read to further deepen the meaning of this idea. To the people of that time, the notion of profession implied a devotion to a calling.
Later, this meaning evolved to imply also a devotion to a craft, whereby a craftsman through the sustained pursuit of their craft might hope to one day be recognised as a master. In that era, young people would apprentice themselves to masters, which required solemn oaths to be made to protect the secrets of the craft but also chained them to the will of the master. The oaths were required to protect the jealously guarded secrets of the profession or trade, which the master had learned from their master and had developed through painstaking devotion to their own craft. Once apprenticeships were complete, the apprentice would be awarded the rank of craftsman and would again be required to swear binding oaths to gain admittance, to belong, to a guild. Guilds were forms of special belonging that guarded the livelihoods of their members, by the regulating of standards and practices, and thereby their collective reputation. The guild was the way that allowed craftsmen not only to belong to their craft, but for the shared craft to profit collectively and cumulatively from their legacy and innovation, and thereby to thrive.
The craft became a vessel for the craftsman to secure their livelihood and define their purpose as they persisted and evolved in their craft. The guild, via another form of belonging, became the transpersonal, inter-generational vessel in which the craft itself could evolve and persist and survive the ravages and rigours of time. The craftsman in turn was a vessel for the craft itself to evolve and persist, generation after generation, each belonging to each, their fates inextricably intertwined. The craftsman was bound by the fate of the craft, and the craft to the fate of the craftsman. This was the full depth of meaning that the word profession once implied.
Our modern times have become so rushed and overwhelming, making us even more likely than ever to overlook the threads of meaning implied by the language and words we use. We never get taught the wisdom or the knack of probing everyday words for their deeper meanings. Nowadays, according to the dictionary, ‘profession’ is taken to mean nothing more than a paid occupation, especially one that involves training and experience. Today, we still retain the idea that we need to invest time, and belong to an occupation by virtue of our experience, but any sense of sacred vow and what this implies has been lost from this world. Along with it, we have lost the notion of the deep sense of belonging that might be implied and we are uninitiated into the profound implication of what that belonging means when craft and calling are joined together.
All our ships and our crafts, including words like relationship, ownership, kinship, readership and workmanship, all imply a form of belonging, which is exactly as trivial or as profound as we allow them to be. Each of us belongs to the reputation of our workmanship. A writer belongs to the readership of their work, and the readership to the writer. True ownership, as in self-ownership or taking ownership of a mistake, is less about possession than it is about accountability and responsibility, which is inevitably conveyed through a deep sense of belonging.
In a very profound way, belonging is deeply connected to meaning and purpose and to the notion of connection itself.
In questions of craft, the oaths that are called to be made, are made to other people and before gods. The way we belong to a true calling is defined by vows, the true kind, which are always made to oneself. We commit ourselves to our craft, we devote ourselves to calling.
My own craft and calling find themselves living under archetypal labels such as father, husband, teacher, writer, poet, philosopher and mystic. As a younger man, I made the mistake of thinking that my job was my profession, a once expansive idea reduced down to the notion of occupation—being paid for that which occupied my time. Similarly, I wanted to be a good father and a good husband, but I was absolutely uninformed that each of these requires a measure of their own craft and calling. We are not provided apprenticeships to these crafts, and we make the surprising discovery, as I was led to, that goodwill and determination alone are not sufficient to avoid great heartbreak and a sense of failure.
The irony is that in any true commitment to craft or devotion to calling and most emphatically when we try and walk in the shoes of both at the same time, the breaking of our hearts and the taking of our promises is precisely how the crucible of life exacts its alchemy on us—which is the only way we can be distilled down to our own purest essence and how our lead is transformed into gold. Our trials and adversities are again exactly how the journey forges us into shape, quenches our brashness and idealism, tempers and hones us into our fullness of form.
Pain it is said, is the breaking of the shell that encloses the understanding. Our hearts are broken precisely to make way for deeper forms of love and our promises taken from us to free us up to belong to deeper commitments to ourselves, both of which open the way for a deeper relationship with life.
If you are on a true path to meet your life’s purpose, your work will both break your heart and welcome you home.
You must have the sense and the courage to choose both.
The word “because”, always points to a reason. Where there is a “because”, there is meaning.
To belong fully to a craft and calling, whether it is as a parent or as a poet, is what it is not just to be vulnerable, but to be extra vulnerable because of something we care for. Every form of true belonging lives under the skein of vulnerability, wherein at times we bear the responsibility of the captain and at other times we bear the helplessness of the rowers lashed to the bench. And if we are doing it properly, we bear both at the same time.
Every good parent knows this. Every husband or wife in a real marriage will be made familiar with the truth of it. All true crafts and callings are vehicles for growth, and real growth requires resistance and adversity.
By definition, our true callings always devise impossible tensions in which we find ourselves torn. Our callings as a husband or wife always live in tension with our callings to ourselves and each does to our callings of outer purpose in life. Our mistakes are the way we grow and the tension is how we transform.
The secret aim of tension is always transformation.
Only once we make peace with this and internalise this understanding—that the stepping stones along the way are not defined by our successes but rather by what we consider our failures, do we really begin to belong to our journeys. Only once we appreciate that the inevitable tension between our commitments and how impossible it can feel at times to try and hold the centre, is precisely what affects the necessary transformation it takes to ever be able to stand in the shoes of the accomplished fullness of that calling.
Getting it wrong, and being torn, having cared deeply about that, having prayed and wished for it to be different, having tasted disappointment and disillusionment is precisely how we know we belong to something. Our deep belonging inhabits us as a sense of ownership we feel towards what we care for and is the very thing that stokes our curiosity and openness to the possibility of what better, and wiser might need to look like and what it will take of us to reach that destination. When we really care for something we find the self-permission to drop the bullshit and the piety and begin to care about what is pragmatic in the service of enabling what really matters most in the end.
Remember, we began with how the word ship meant “to shape” but also “to appoint”. Disappointment is how our journeys relieve us from smaller appointments. Similarly, the way we outgrow our illusions is via disillusion. We only ever hit deep disappointment when we knew we were doing our best. Our journeys bring us into contact with our limits, in a way that forces us to face how our current best is not always enough to meet the ask of the moment. Our current limits are not our permanent limitations.
There is a real peace to be found when we begin to internalise the understanding that we aren’t supposed to get it right all the time and we should not expect that of ourselves, nor of people who are trying their best too.
Vulnerability & Security
We follow modern professions in part to find some sense of purpose, and in part for some sense of security.
“A false sense of security is the only kind there is.” —Michael Meade
Consider the metaphor of a job for a company, being no more than a rower being goaded by a cox, in a team of other rowers, competing in a made race towards a finish line we only ever have our backs to. And to know that, win or lose, we can be dropped from the team at any point through no fault of our own, and have our investment of sacrifice and grit taken for granted and all our camaraderie, bonds of connection and sense of shared purpose cancelled in a moment. That is the competitive field of corporate industry.
Very few of what we call modern professions are any more than uninspiring barges that sail under the masthead of a degree or a diploma, ubiquitous and replaceable, or crowded ferries that shuttle passengers back and forth between two static points. The most daring are rafts lashed together from the flotsam of entrepreneurial endeavour and the mismatched timbers from the scaffolding of our hard-knock educations. Aside from being depressing prospects in the case of the first two, all three lack the essential combinations of depth, range, drive and steering to make them compatible for daring voyages of adventure and discovery. The barge is slow-moving and built for flat predictable water, the ferry is locked between a pair of points, neither of which are origins or destinations, and rafts are usually more defined by their ingenuity and pluck than by the actual seaworthiness of their design.
In nautical terms, they have no ballast and no draft. Ballast is the term for weight added to the lowest part of a ship to ‘ground’ the vessel in the water and draft is the depth of a craft’s keel below the waterline. The relationship between ballast and draft is thus integral to the ability a ship has to endure rough seas and wild weather.
In short, our modern professions are poor vessels for the pursuit of real purpose and whatever security they offer comes as a direct compromise to true freedom and ambition of reach. The only vessels that might ever venture the real daring voyages of purpose that can fill a life with meaning, and a profoundly intimate sense of belonging, are in our devotional relationships to craft and calling.
The more invested you are in its chance to flourish and live in the world, the more it matters to you how it might live on in the world, and how it will become and remain appreciated, respected and cherished when you are gone. To love a thing this way—a person, a relationship, the fruits of a craft or the craft itself—is to become concerned with questions of legacy and to be exposed to much wider and deeper forms of vulnerability and need, and not be able to, or even wish to, look away.
When you risk yourself for love, it opens a door wide in you, right through the city walls of your private world, through which you encounter new and troubling extents and depths to your own vulnerability.
The more devoted we are to our sense of purpose and calling in life, the harder and more demanding the way becomes. Equally, it is precisely our vulnerability that underscores the significance of our journeys, not just by the destinations we seek but by the changes we undergo, and ultimately by the way we find belonging, to ourselves, through the discovery of and belonging to our purpose.
The hardship of the journey is exactly matched to the value of the prize and the greatness of the soul who dares the way.
You are forced to define a new relationship with the frontiers of what is wild and what is tame, what is strange and what is familiar, and forced to deal with the amenities of unrequitedness and grief.
To give yourself deeply to a craft and calling, in the way that you are charged with its care, is to become a parent of something in one sense and to become wedded to something in another. It is the plight of all parents to be charged with a responsibility that always feels too large for them. It is the fate of all weddings to outlive the natural buoyancy of their own honeymoons, and to settle on the lakebed of mundanity and chores, where all the lively spring of novelty can become silted up by the detritus of necessities and chores—where all the exciting coulds and maybes give way to musts and shoulds.
Epic journeys that are marked by deep commitment, will introduce more than enough tedium and obligation to balance out the dopamine hits of thrills and wins. Strangely, true journeys of discovery are not only expected to be arduous, but we discover the arduousness adds a profound depth to our sense of meaning. After toiling, deep in exile, far from what feels like home, having faced much by way of ordeals and little by way of success, we reach the low places, which are exactly where we find the unexpected gold. As if all along we were chasing something shiny on the crest of a far hill, only to watch it recede again and again, agonisingly out of reach, beyond every new horizon of endeavour. To be brought at last to the low places, where we encounter the crossroads that lead off in every direction, all maddeningly brightly lit in invitation and shadowed in uncertainty. And beside the path, the bitter well of deep disappointment and disillusionment. And having nothing else to drink and nowhere left to turn, we sink the bucket of our prayer, again and again, deeper and deeper into that well, we encounter at last the bedrock of our conviction, that hallowed foundation we can ever call true faith. The kind of faith, not of a belief in an outer power, but in the undeniable and unshakable knowing that we are brought through exile and unrequitedness, to the realisation that we cannot unmake or remake our hearts, that they love what they love, and we cannot feel whole and home without it. We encounter a deeper sense of knowing, that our callings were not idle fancies and a voice speaks in our hearts again, teaching us the same words of the old prayer:
My life is happening for me. Everything is always as it should be. I am always exactly where I need to be, and this is not the end.
“It’s going to be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
John Lennon
Safety is no substitute for freedom and belonging. The only real form of security we discover is this kind of faith—born from a deep knowledge of oneself and how we belong emphatically to our calling.
There is a road that belongs to you, and you belong to it.
This life is a game. We only get one chance at this particular life. There might be something else going on afterwards or there might be another chance to have another life over, or some even stranger alternative; Either way, there is no reason to believe that we get another chance at this one.
We are all stowaways of our own uncertain futures. The difference between courage and recklessness is meaning. It takes great courage to stop huddling near the lifeboats, to put on the captain’s hat and chart a course into the unknown, it costs nothing and it costs us everything. The only way we ever connect with great meaning is through the discovery, acceptance and pursuit of our purpose, which we name Calling. Answering and giving ourselves completely to calling, is the meaning of the mystery and miracle of life, and how we might ever belong to that.
Love the John Lennon quote!! Great work Rocco