What is my Job?

I've been thinking a lot these days about jobs. I currently have one, thankfully, but I'm looking for another one, and trying to figure out what kind of job I want. I find the most difficult aspect of this is sifting through and reconciling "The Way Life Is Supposed To Go" with "What I Want." These two things, I'm realizing, may not overlap so much. Twenty-eight years of subtle and explicit cultural and societal messages about ambition, success, career, education, etc. have become a mountain atop the latter, which I am now trying to unearth, slowly but surely.

I read something today that helps. It's by Jon Kabat-Zinn, a Buddhist teacher who wrote the book Wherever You Go, There You Are. I read one short chapter every morning before meditating. It is an excellent and accessible guide to meditation and mindful living. The passage I read this morning is called, "What is My Job on the Planet with a Capital J?" I want to share a small part of it:

Rarely do we question and then contemplate with determination what our hearts are calling us to do and to be. I like to frame such efforts in question form: "What is my job on the planet with a capital J?", or, "What do I care about so much that I would pay to do it?" If I ask such a question and I don't come up with an answer, other than, "I don't know," then I just keep asking the question. If you start reflecting on such questions when you're in your twenties, by the time you are thirty-five or forty, or fifty or sixty, the inquiry itself may have led you a few places that you would not have gone had you merely followed mainstream conventions, or your parents' expectations for you, or even worse, your own unexamined self-limiting beliefs and expectations.

...[Asking this question] may not mean that you will change what you do, but it may mean that you may want to change how you see it or hold it, and perhaps how you do it. Once the universe is your employer, very interesting things start to happen, even if someone else is cutting your paycheck.

Kabat-Zinn also talks about Buckminster Fuller in this chapter, and about how, from the depths of depression, Fuller decided to live his life from then on as if he were an employee of the universe, basing his actions on the question, "What is it on this planet that needs doing that I know something about, that probably won't happen unless I take responsibility for it?" He says that Fuller also liked to point out that, for the honey bee, it's all about the honey, but in its pursuit of honey, it becomes nature's (or the universe's) pollinator.*

It's still not easy to figure out whether I want to be a farmer, a baker, a social worker, or something else entirely, but it's reassuring to know that no matter what job I find myself doing, if I approach it right, it will be my Job.

*from Kabat-Zinn, Jon. Wherever You Go, There You Are. New York: Hyperion, 1994.