What Would You Do If You Could Do Anything?

Last year, in July of 2020, I decided I wanted to write a book of poems. I was faced with one problem immediately. I hadn’t finished a poem in over six months, and if I wanted to publish a collection by the end of the year, I was going to have to spend the next several months writing intensively. Though I didn’t know it at the time, this moment would be a turning point for me in my life as a writer. Over the next few months, I would slowly begin to turn away from a full-time job that I loved but that wasn’t leaving time in the day for me to work on what really mattered to me. Something I loved equally, if not more: poetry. 

In the pursuit of your calling, there are a few things you have to keep in mind. First, you’ve got to look out for what I call breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb moments are like Aha! moments but better. They’re the small moments in our lives that seem inconsequential at the time, but that actually reveal a path toward the core of who we are. They remind us of what we’re meant to do in this world.

On my own path, one of the breadcrumbs that signaled that I might be a poet happened in high school. My teacher recited Wallace Stevens’s Anecdote of the Jar— it’s a simple poem in which the speaker places a jar on a hill in Tennessee. He watches as the wilderness, “no longer wild,” rises up to meet the human-made object. What it recalled for me was growing up in rural South Carolina. It brought back my time spent roaming the woods near my home, and also the feeling I had when I would go back later and see some of those pine forests hauled away and sold for timber. That deft combination of wonder and also grief all came pre-packaged in just three short stanzas. This moment was the first time I remember thinking to myself, I may really want to do that. In hindsight, I know that it was me coming toe-to-toe with my calling.

The point here is that I didn’t wake up one day and decide to become a poet, as I’m sure that Beyoncé, Steven Spielberg, or William Faulkner didn’t wake up one day and become masters of their craft. They had to start somewhere, which is my next point: whatever it is that you are feeling called to do, whatever point your breadcrumbs have led you to, you have to give yourself permission to try even if you might fail. 

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron says, “Progress, not perfection, is what we should be asking of ourselves,” and I couldn’t agree more. The fear of failure is a paralyzing one and can often keep us from pursuing our calling. The key is to keep an open mind, stay open to failure, and then observe what happens when you do, inevitably, fail. If you’re a singer, do you come back to that same ballad, even when you miss the most difficult note? If you’re a teacher, do you still feel compelled to teach even after you torpedoed your most recent lesson? If the answer is yes, then chances are you’re on the right track. In my case, it’s not that writing is always easy or that I’ve never written a poem I didn’t like— I write because it’s where I feel most connected to something greater than myself. It’s food for my soul. But I would have never known that if I hadn’t given myself permission to try.

If progress is what we’re aiming for in pursuit of our calling, then we should also remain aware that there may be unexpected twists and turns along the way. As you change over time, your calling may change as well. You may find yourself following new breadcrumbs or finding other things that fuel your spirit. That doesn’t make you wishy-washy or out of touch with who you are. It doesn’t mean that you don’t know some of what you’re meant to do in the world. It just makes you human. At some point, we all have to recognize that the point of our lives is not to have answers to every possible question. The point of living is to respond to life as it happens— in short, to become ourselves over time as we respond to the events of our lives. Jackson Pollock says, “The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.” If the painting is your life, your job is to let it shine through, whatever it may end up being.

When I first started writing, I wanted to be a novelist or a short story writer. In my mind, that’s what serious writers did, and I wanted more than anything to be considered a serious writer. What I was envisioning for myself, though, just wasn’t playing out on the page. 

“So what would you do if you could do anything, and what are you waiting for?”

Though I wasn’t a big poetry reader, I found myself drawn to the rhythm and flow of poetry. I found myself telling stories but in shorter, poetic forms. I was able to write in longform if I really wanted to, but the truth is that I found more joy in the poetic voice than in prose. I was free to express myself more fully and I felt like I had more to say. The lesson I took away from my experience was that my own inflexibility was pulling me away from my calling instead of toward it. Once I stopped resisting, I freed myself to become a better writer and to begin sharing my work with others.

So last year, when I felt the pull to write a book, I knew that it would be difficult. I was juggling a full-time position at a nonprofit that was being severely impacted by the pandemic. I was also in the middle of a cross-country move back to my home state of South Carolina. But I wanted to write it anyway, and as I wrote, I realized that despite all of the questions I was having in my life, about my career and where I wanted to live, the writing kept me grounded. As I finished up the final drafts of poems and started compiling them into a book, I decided to commit myself more to my craft and to pursue an MFA in poetry this year.

The path to this point hasn’t been straight or easy. Pursuing a graduate degree meant that I had to quit my job in the middle of a global pandemic. It meant that I had to find a way to support myself financially as I submitted applications and began the process of moving. On top of that, I still had doubts some days. Will I still want to be a poet and writer in five years? And what will I do if this doesn’t work out? 

And yet I’m finding myself settling into a comfortable rhythm as well. I’m comforted by some wisdom from Zora Neale Hurston: “There are years that ask questions and there are years that answer.” I know now that on the path toward finding your calling you have to get comfortable riding the waves between what’s possible to know about your life and what will remain unknown.  

What about you? What waves are you encountering on the path toward your calling? What questions are you asking that don’t yet have answers? If there’s anything I can say after my own experience, it’s that the simple act of asking these questions of ourselves is usually the beginning of a shift. A step forward, a step toward trying something new or different. Maybe even one step closer toward your calling. If nothing else, we owe it ourselves to try! So what would you do if you could do anything, and what are you waiting for?