Calling

A year or so ago, I listened to Gaudy Night by Dorothy Sayers on audiobook while I was commuting to USC.  Great book.  That doesn’t even begin to cover it.  It’s a mystery of sorts, and the action is intriguing and interesting… but oh, what she has to say about the human heart!  Sayers was wise.  She really makes me think… hard.

It’s been long enough that I’m not sure I can really describe her argument accurately.  So take it with a grain of salt.  This may or may not be quite what she actually says.  It is what I currently am thinking about in part because I kind of think she said it.  What she actually said is more profound than this, I am sure, and more complete and nuanced and generally wonderful.  Anyway, moving on.

The main character of Gaudy Night is Harriet Vane, an Oxford-educated woman who writes mystery novels in a time when few women were college-educated.  To the extent that that defines her, Harriet Vane is of course an autobiographical character – Dorothy Sayers was an Oxford-educated woman who wrote mystery novels.  It becomes still more interesting because the plot takes place at a reunion of sorts – Harriet is back at Oxford, interacting with her old teachers and classmates, thinking about academic life and what it means.

There are a lot of conversations in this book about calling, about your job.  Some of those have to do with marriage.  Harriet loves her mystery writing in a world where for plenty of women, their only job was marriage and family.  Meanwhile, many people think it’s kind of ghoulish and strange for her to write mysteries because she herself had been falsely accused of murder and very nearly hanged for it.  But she has to write mysteries, and she gets excited about it, and even though she sort of agrees with them mentally that it is a little ghoulish, at heart she doesn’t agree at all.

In this context comes a deeply profound conversation about what your job is.  By your job they mean something much more than what you do for a living, though it may well be what you do for a living if you are lucky.  Miss Devine, one of the teachers, and Harriet are talking, and Miss Devine pretty clearly seems to be the voice of Sayers in the conversation.  I don’t think I have the points in the order they were made, but among other points Miss Devine made in the conversation, she says, first, that when something is really your job, it doesn’t matter how people think you should feel about it, you just have to do it.  Some people, she says, make a person their job.  They give everything to that person, everything.  She doesn’t despise them, she says, but she herself has a more intellectual job.  Harriet asks how one is to know what is really your job.  Miss Devine says one will know because when something is really your job, you don’t make mistakes, not about things that really matter.  Little errors, but not big core mistakes.  It matters too much to you.  You pay attention, and you avoid mistakes.  You take pains over your job.  Harriet asks if taking pains over a thing may be the distinction that means it is your job; Miss Devine says just about, but she still doesn’t think it’s quite as much proof as not making mistakes; it’s easier to trick ourselves into thinking we take pains over a thing than to trick ourselves into thinking we really got it right.  She also says at some point that we know what we want to do by what we do – regardless of what we try to talk ourselves into thinking we want to do.  At some point Miss Devine mentions that she is very concerned about the pernicious effect it has on a person to be someone’s job.  That when a wife or mother makes her husband or children her job, her be-all and end-all, it has a negative effect on the loved one’s character.  Harriet says she thought Miss Devine said she didn’t despise those who make people their job.  “I don’t despise them,” she responds.  “Far from it!  I think they are dangerous.”

If you’re interested in this topic, you should really read the book; there’s so much more thought here that I’m not capturing.  Even the mystery plot contributes to this theme.

Ever since then I’ve been thinking about it off and on on a personal level.  What is it that I do no matter what anyone thinks, no matter what I myself think?  What is it I can’t stand not to do perfectly?  What is it I keep trying and trying to get absolutely right, no matter how difficult that is, no matter how much sleep I lose in the process?

The curious problem for me is, there’s more than one such thing.  That’s why I had so much trouble picking a major.  That’s why it is so difficult for me to settle on a career and stick with it.  Not because I don’t have a career which I love and which is utterly my job.  But because I’m neglecting my other jobs in the process.

It’s the kind of problem you want to have, but it’s still a problem.  There isn’t enough time in the day for three jobs… and I think I have at least three jobs, maybe four, depending on what you count.  Things I cannot happily put aside for any length of time.  Things I pursue earnestly, trying to do my best.

I have hobbies, too.  Jogging and puppetry and piano and knitting.  Chores like cooking and cleaning.  I love my hobbies… but they don’t get done that much.  I don’t love the chores, but I do like the results… but they get done as hastily and with as few pains as I can get away with.  Why?  Because I have at least three jobs.

The least of them is singing.  Perhaps it’s not really a job at all, perhaps it’s just a glorified hobby.  I don’t put in the time I need to get everything really right.  I don’t take lessons anymore and haven’t for a long time.  The force of the other two jobs crowds them out.  I still sing and practice and try to do my best and cringe over little mistakes no one else seems to notice… but I’ve always known I was unlikely to be anything really special there.  That I wasn’t going to be a professional, and that I might not even be capable of making my college choir.  (Unfortunately, choir overlapped with required classes every year, so it is a moot point.)  Still, I’ve joked so many times that if I didn’t sing I would shrivel up and die.  And I do practice every day, in the oddest places and at the oddest times, anytime I can get away with it.  I do warm-ups and drills and songs.  I listen very critically to my own voice and repeat the same line a dozen times until I think I have it.  I was happy, fiercely happy, when I was on choir tour or choir retreat or at Musicale, where my days were consumed by singing.  It has been long, so long, since I could make serious time for it in the midst of everything else.  It is only a third job.  But if not for my first two jobs, it could happily be my job.  If I loved all three the same amount and had thought singing the most, instead of the least, practical, the one where I had the most, instead of the least, natural talent… it might be my first job.  But it is not.  And I wish at times that I had a lifetime to dedicate to singing, but I do not.

The second is writing.  If I can broaden the category, it’s the entire conversation of great literature.  Discussion, philosophy, thought, emotional life.  Reading and writing both.  Story.  Thinking about anything and everything.  When I’m not at work or enjoying time with friends, I’m normally doing something related to this broad category.  The narrow category is not so universally dominant in my life, but it’s still key.  I must write.  I must write stories and I must write little essays like this one.  Are there mistakes?  Yes, oh yes.  And for all the time and all the hundreds of thousands of words I have poured into it, I have never yet finished a story.  I agonize, sometimes, over wishing I had the time to give my everything to writing, to see what I could do.  Would I succeed if it were my top priority?  I don’t know.  I wish I had the chance to find out.  I wish I could look at a book I had written and know it was right, know it was good, know it was well-crafted, as Harriet Vane could do in time.

And the first, the one that I have begun my career working in, is logical problem-solving.  I am a microprocessor design engineer; how much time I have spent, through the years, solving logic puzzles, playing with math, being logical as logical can be!  I love math; everyone who knows me finds that out pretty quickly.  All is right with the world when I can sit there working my puzzles, and I lose track of everything else.  Is math a great thing and a beautiful thing?  Yes.  Is my enjoyment of it disproportionately high?  Yes.  There are other beautiful things; but math is my job.  There are other worthwhile tasks, but I value the mind and the life of thought.  I wish to see everyone appreciate it, to see no one dread it.  I thrill to a well-written line of code.  I try to understand thoroughly, to own the concepts I have heard once.  I try to learn more, and so not only do I have my full-time job, I am taking classes towards my master’s degree, too, studying when I can.

I am an unabashed mathematician, an engineer, a nerd.  I am so happy to have my job, so happy to get to pour myself into something I love.

But if I weren’t an engineer, I would be a writer, or try to be.  I can hardly bear that I am not a writer if I do not stop and remind myself that I am an engineer.

And if I weren’t either of those, I might try to be a singer.

There isn’t enough time for all those things.  Not really.  But I try anyway.  I can’t help it.  Or rather, I suppose I sort of can help it… but it takes something mighty powerful to motivate me to the effort of not attempting to do math/engineering, write, and sing, and to do it right, really right, not one problem incorrect, not one sentence out of place, not one note sour.

I would like to add that I never begrudge the time I spend with my friends, my church, my God.  That there is more to life than even jobs like these.  That when a need is strong sometimes one's duty is to meet that need, regardless of whether it's what you want to do.  That we need the self-discipline to sometimes overpower those desperate urges of the heart and say, no, I want to get this last calculus problem right, and I know my current answer is wrong, but it is time for me to clean up my room so my roommate won't be too distressed when she walks into the room.  To say, I want to delegate this task which is terribly unsuited to me, but right now I'm the only one who can do it, and it must be done.  To say, O God, here am I, send me; I give up my dreams.  But there are also times, many times, when that is not necessary; when you serve the world best by doing your job.

I don’t think my cooking is likely to improve much anytime soon.

What is your job?