The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness.  – Emerson

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done. – Frost

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one. – Shaw

Become such as you are, having learned what that is. – Pindar

                  One thrill – and frustration – of contemporary consciousness is realizing that whatever we think has been thought before. While Ecclesiastes grumbled about this millennia ago – “There is nothing new under the sun” -- the sophistication of today’s research tools intensifies the challenge. Ask Alistair (AI) and my excited a-hahs shrivel into blushing duh’s.

                  Case in point. Isn’t vocation, I ask myself, deduction? We mistake as a “calling” what our instincts, talents, and aptitudes suit us for. Wondering who’s pondered this, I ask Alistair, who retrieves the four foregoing quotes by old pals and others by sages less renowned. It’s as if Columbus, arriving at the New World, happened on a McDonald’s. Deflation succeeds elation. Oh shit, I think, and I was feeling so smart!

                  Often have I felt moved to do what I’m doing now, smelting perceptions, if I can, into attractive language. Ignorant what was moving me, I attributed my inclination to God, fate, the divine. I knew that was hogwash, but how exciting to plant myself in the tradition of Moses, Saint Paul, Martin Luther: “Here I stand, I can do no other!”

                  While it may be true my profession was inevitable, it’s because I’m unfit for other work. I lack the diligence of a scholar or humility of a student. Restlessly ambitious, I bristle at taking orders. I loathe… stupidity, brutality, deceit… don’t get me started. I’ve learned, I hope, to present myself amiably, but it took some doing: my youthful prose bristles with oracular pomposity. 

                  These character traits poked me through my career like a descending pinball. Unfit I gave myself fits. Most debilitating, I never much cared for money. Eventually – gratis luck, Jane, retirement, the Internet, you guys – I landed here, in what the Shaker hymn calls “the place just right… the valley of love and delight.” I delight in seeing and saying – and your generous encouragement supplies my excuse.

                  In hindsight, my a-hah was a duh. Of course, my inadequacies suited me for no other business. Hindsight laughs at foresight’s bewilderment. Some folks know what they’re meant for from the cradle: think, Mozart. Others fumble feeling for where they belong.

                  The Nameless One proved my inadvertent benefactor. His audacious evil ignited desperate outrage. So what my pith was pitiful against his strength – all of us were summoned to do whatever we could to arrest his advance. I love how big Michelangelo made his David. The David of legend was a boy; this David rises bigger than Goliath. Conviction sometimes grows us into giants.

                  I have nothing new to report. Humans are the same old screwups as ever. But we forget and need reminding. That Emerson, Frost, Shaw, Pindar, and how many others have tromped here before does not relieve my responsibility. Each must battle the battle of our day as if we were the first. Our world will always need saving till our efforts fail.