The False Choice Between Safety and Calling
La falsa elección entre seguridad y vocación
A student grapples with the tension between pursuing a stable career and following a strong pull toward healing work, wondering whether the two paths are truly incompatible.
The False Choice Between Safety and Calling
A student grapples with the tension between pursuing a stable career and following a strong pull toward healing work, wondering whether the two paths are truly incompatible.
A previous question brought up my own frantic impulse toward a certain kind of healing work. In the midst of pursuing it, I realized I needed that healing myself, and maybe I was moving too soon. What I was grappling with was that at times the calling felt very obvious and strong, and at other times, possibly because I'm in the Bay Area where so many people are either doing healing work or trying to get into it (therapy, shamanism, Reiki, you name it), I could see in myself and in this broader movement some shadow, some unintegrated parts, some lack of temperament, pacing, and thorough training.
So I ultimately decided to slow down. This isn't the moment for a career shift. The story I've been telling myself is that if it really wants to happen, I'll keep putting energy there and it'll happen gradually. I don't need to take the leap just yet. I think that's the right, responsible move, and I think it's working. The area I want to get into is relationship therapy, and in the last forty-eight hours a couple of friends reached out for advice and were really grateful for what I offered. I felt so lit up, like it felt wonderful to support people in that way.
So maybe this is less of a question. But I'm still fascinated by that moment where it feels like a false choice: I can either do the safe thing, get another software engineering job, rest on something known; or I can take a leap of faith, create a whole new life, follow my soul's calling, and trust that things will be sunshine and rainbows. If I go in the direction of safety, I feel like I've made some existential choice toward safety and therefore toward death, like I'm reinforcing playing it safe and not living my fullest life. If I move in the other direction, I sometimes sense the superficiality of it, wondering whether I'm just yet another software engineer trying to become a therapist. I don't know. I'm so fascinated by this area, and I think there's a reckoning in it for me at some point.
You said it at the beginning: probably a false choice. You mean it's the illusion of a choice, as though the two paths are mutually exclusive. Is that what you meant?
Yes.
The mind's bias toward extremes
You're right on, because you saw it. Why not do both? I'm not saying that's the definitive answer, but any sweet spot of balance between the two is possible. You could get some kind of work using the skills you have and simultaneously do some training in the thing you're called toward.
There is no such thing as a calling where you never have to do anything you don't want to do. If you start your own business, you'll have to deal with accounting and finances. If you work for somebody else, you avoid all that administrative burden, but you face other losses. If you want to learn an instrument and become a musician, you have to do all kinds of things that are quite challenging and painful.
The mind creates this illusion: all of this on one side, all of that on the other, and they're completely separate. One side is going to be easy, effortless, exactly what I want. The other side is all sacrifice, nothing good. That's just what the mind does. The mind is very good at painting two scenarios as extreme polar opposites, and it does that because it is conditioned.
My teacher once said something I never forgot, and it struck me as profoundly clear. An unconditioned mind, when looking at two options, will give you a long list of pros and a long list of cons for option A, and an equally long list of pros and cons for option B. A conditioned mind will remove the cons from one option and remove the pros from the other. It becomes biased. A free, unconditioned mind can offer you pros and cons for both. But when we are conditioned, we don't use the mind for what it's for. We use it to convince ourselves of what we already wanted to be convinced of. We use the mind to rationalize. We skip the pros on one side and the cons on the other, and then we say, "Oh, clearly it's this way."
What happens when the mind is unconditioned
If you really do this honestly, you're going to end up confused, because the mind isn't going to tell you A or B. If it's conditioned, the mind will tell you A or B, but then you're a robot, just acting out whatever the conditioning dictates. It's automatic behavior. If, on the other hand, the mind is being used in an unconditioned way, it's going to be confusing, because there's no clear evidence pointing to A or B. But that's exactly the place you want to be, because now the answer becomes more of a mystery: What do I want? There are pros and cons in both. What does the universe, as me, want?
I think that might be where I'm getting tripped up. Ultimately we do have to make decisions in life. What I hear you saying is that the mind's role is to analyze and bring in information. If it's being used correctly, you're gathering raw data without the mind coloring it too much, and that frees you up to make the decision from something else.
From uncertainty and risk. No guarantees.
The trap of flipping without acting
That choice moment is precisely why this area is so interesting to me.
What you're describing is the experience of the mind flipping: conditioned to one way, then conditioned to the other way, back and forth. This starts to happen when we begin to disidentify and see the conditioning. The mind starts flipping, but we're still trying to answer what to do with the mind. That flipping could also be a way you operate within ambiguity and then never act. It could be a way in which you use the mind to create confusion: "No, it's B. No, it's A. No, it's B." And then you don't act. It's a way to stay in a state of paralysis.
One of the things that's come to me recently is that it almost doesn't matter which option you choose. Make the choice to the best of your ability. There's a lot more creative energy and flow in simply making a choice, regardless of what it is.
The importance of doing
Putting energy out. Living. Making choices. This is a process of learning through experience, through doing. You will only know in hindsight, and then you adjust.
In a way, what you said is true: it doesn't really matter what you choose. If you're stuck in not doing, then the doing is what matters. The moving, the putting energy out. But at the same time, it does matter what you choose. You can't avoid that either. So what's in between? It matters tremendously, and it doesn't really matter. Whatever will work. And that's the process: being in uncertainty, being in not-knowing, moving, exploring, learning, gaining hindsight. It's a fine-tuning, a listening. What do I want? What do I see was a conditioned wanting, a bias?
Let the calling take its own shape
You could say the best way to be a healer is to heal. The best way to be a relationship counselor, obviously with all the training, is to work on having a good relationship yourself. If there is a vocation in you to support relationships, who knows what form it takes? Maybe it's not a profession in the way you imagine. Maybe it's through groups that you host with your partner. You do it from an exploration that is ethical and doesn't offer something you can't offer, but that shares the depth of your own relationship. Maybe it's not a career at all.
That was part of the wisdom I landed on as well. Just because I feel something as a calling doesn't mean it's necessarily my primary income.
Nor something you need to do in a very specific way, as the mind would imagine. You've told me you've done creative computational projects and won awards. To me, that's a sign that there's something right there, something appropriate. It's aligned.
Yeah. I'm in the interview process for something that also feels aligned.
And you have a child on the way. That's a very important thing to keep in mind, because financial stability in the stage you're entering is going to be really valuable for all of you. Since you have the ability to do that, it's very compelling and possibly very appropriate right now.
I think that's part of what's in my question too. Raising a kid is a lot, and working full-time is a lot, and the two together don't leave much room for career transitions. There's a part of me that sometimes thinks I missed my chance to make a big pivot before having a kid.
Exploring your full potential
You don't know that. The human condition is wasting time. You could be raising a kid, having a full-time job, and still be wasting time, because there are many moments in the day, in the night, on the weekends. You'll have habits of wasting time, ways of indulging, attention being spent on things that are not productive. So just shift those into something else.
What is the limit of your potential? I don't think you know it yet. You haven't fully explored that. How do you know you can't be an incredible father, have a full-time job, and then do some other really significant thing in your free time? I know people personally who are good parents, have full-time work, and then are really good at some other thing. It might be a hobby, but at a level where it could be something out in the world: creating music, running a big project.
I love that point about having places where your time gets siphoned off. I think of the Kurosawa film Ikiru, about a bureaucrat who realizes he's wasted his life. At the very last moment he gets a public park created. He's overcome with a sense of wanting to do something, and he finds every last place where he was otherwise wasting energy and devotes it to this very passionate, animated act. That resonated.
There will be periods where you won't have time for anything, but there will be periods where you will. I can't speak from experience of being a father, but I can add information from parents I know who have been able to do this. What's more obvious to me is how we don't explore our full potential. It's a feature of the human condition. There's a lot of indulgence, a lot of wasting time, and a lot of fear around our full potential.
Yeah, that feels like it's at the root of it. What is the fear?
Go for everything. Do it all. It's fine. Just explore. Really. How do you know you can't? You don't, until you do it. And then things will naturally, if you explore them and they're not meant to be, fall away. Or they will be meant to be to a degree and then recede as a learning process.
I delved into visual art, painting, drawing, and it was amazing. Then it fizzled out and I don't have interest in it anymore. But it was a really big deal for me at the time, and it carried something and left something in me. I was really drawn to it and I needed to explore it. If I hadn't, it would have been a kind of loss.
It's funny. I'm almost having this image of the creative impulse, the erotic impulse in terms of life-force, as its own thing. That is the path, and there are things that come up to greet it along the way, but it's not about the specific thing.
The tantric path. Fully into life. Fully about aliveness, passion, abundance, complete intimacy and sensuality.
Completeness and movement
Then how does that fit with the sense or the felt reality of completion, of having already arrived, while life keeps moving?
That's a paradox. It can't really be made clear to anybody until it's known, because I can speak to it, but I know it's simply not comprehensible until you know it. In a sense, what gets completed is that which thought it was going to be completed when some experience was going to happen or some destination was going to be arrived at. The completion is the journey itself. The movement is complete in itself. It's all about the movement and the flow, which is the nature of reality, and it's complete because the movement itself is the completeness.
So there's no real difference between what I was articulating as two things.
There is none. The mind sees them as two irreconcilable things, but they're not. It's one thing. That's the koan: before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. Nothing really changes. There is movement, there is life. But if one version is perceived as incomplete and the other is not, the difference is that in the second, reality is seen. Chop wood, carry water, life is incomplete. Chop wood, carry water, I see now that it is complete. Not as an idea or a thought or a belief. It's simply known to be the nature of reality. And you do end up chopping wood and carrying water much better than before, because you're not all caught up in the drama of it being incomplete.
But even if alongside that realization came some kind of disability and you were actually far less efficient?
"Chop wood, carry water" is a metaphor for life. It's inevitable that that which is essential in the living does become better. There's wisdom to it, to that movement. Even if there's some incapacity, whatever the movement is, there will be a friction removed. That's inevitable. But this starts to create the idea that you can get to that state, and that's not what it is. It's about seeing that this, right now, is what you're looking for. It's complete. It's total. It's also empty. But I want to emphasize what is typically missed. There's a misinterpretation, a belief that says: "This is not it. It's incomplete. Something's missing."
Tasting it, even briefly
It's funny, as you're talking, I can feel myself measuring the degree to which what you're saying feels true. There are moments where I'm like, "Oh yeah," and I can feel it right now. And then other times it dials back to maybe forty-five percent, or five percent, and I'm not sure I'm getting any of it. Or maybe I think I'm getting it but I'm not. But maybe that just comes with time.
What matters is that you recognize it, even for an instant. Even for an instant. That's why you're here and we're having this conversation. From there, it's about seeing and clarifying that more and more. But my point is that this isn't something you believe because I said it. You taste it in the moment, and so you recognize it.