Missed Vocations?

This thread was originally started months ago, and then sort of abandoned.  I then found it again, and oddly enough, for some other reasons, I started typing out a thread that was sort of related to it.  Given that, I'm picking this one back up.  I quite frankly don't know if it's still on the same topic or not.

Anyhow, the other day I was speaking to a working class fellow who is connected to a lawsuit when the topic of his children came up.  They're in the same line of work that he is.  He told me, "I tried to get them to be doctors or lawyers but . . . "

He probably ought to be glad they didn't listen to him.

I listed to my father the one and only time that he gave me career advice, which I've noted here before, and that was a mistake.  I was planning, at the time, of becoming a game warden.  I was still in high school at the time, probably a junior, and mentioned it, and he noted that there were "a lot of unemployed people around here" with wildlife management degrees. There likely were.  Indeed, a family friend of ours was glad when his son gave up that pursuit to become an electrician for the same reason.  I never commented on it, but it saddened me.

I started off in geology, but when I graduated with that, there were no jobs in it. So, ironically, I ended up with the no job situation anyway.  I went to law school after that, as I'd never heard of an unemployed lawyer.

The other day, a friend of mine from my geology student days, who now works in another field as well, commented on how they can't find people to work. We've been noting the same thing.  He noted that "it's nice to have a job that you love, but most work is just work". 

Truer words were never spoken.  

Having said that, some work is worse than others.  One thing that's been noticeable recently in the law is that younger people are leaving the field of litigation.  Quite a few young law school graduates are just not going to work at all.

On the upper end, where I am, peering out from the edge of my late 50s into my early 60s, I'm at the point where retirement becomes a possibility, or maybe not.  Like Col. Nickerson in A Bride Over The River Kwai, you also begin to look back.  You also find, right about that time, that if you are a professional that you have no real frame of reference for retirement, and that everyone will conspire against it.

Indeed, most conversations that you will get into right about then start off with the "you're too young" or "what would you do?".  But beyond that, there are those who will express outright fear about your retiring, and they're mostly members of your own family.  Nobody encourages a person to postpone retirement more than a spouse, I think.  That's probably not true for people once they hit actual retirement age, say 65 or 67, but if the topic comes up earlier, you'll get the "that's a great idea, if you just get in . . . "  In other words, you need to keep working.

And for a person in my situation, with two kids still in college, that's probably true.  Something has really changed since I was that age in that conditions that existed when I was young are now pushed upwards in years.  

Or perhaps I just didn't notice them then.

Insurance is one such thing. We just switched insurance carriers as insurance for our two college age children is brutally high.  If I were retired right now, that would be the single biggest expense month to month I'd have right now.

So the old plow mule is turned around to plow another row.

"You missed your calling" is a phrase I used to hear adults utter when I was a kid, in reference to people who seemingly should have entered some occupation they didn't^[1]. .  The phrase was based on the concept of everyone having a "calling".

Given that it was so common, when I was young, I sort of assumed that everyone actually had a specific calling.  I.e., you might have a calling to the priesthood, or you might have one to be an auto mechanic.  I know that I'm not the only one who had this assumption, as one of my uncles mentioned having had the same concept when he was a kid.

That's not the way that Catholics generally understand it, however.   What Catholics actually believe is that people generally receive a calling to a vocation, in religions terms.  As one Catholic site puts it:

A person can have many different callings in life. For instance a person can have a calling to marriage, to fatherhood, and to a certain occupation. In the Catholic worldview everything we do should be ordered toward discerning and responding to the will of God, the ultimate good in an imperfect world. Ordering our lives toward God’s desire is the way in which we get to heaven. We do this in many ways. The following list is not exhaustive:

• Discerning our primary vocation (marriage, priesthood, religious life, etc.)
• Discerning our particular vocation (whom to marry, etc.)
• Following God’s will for our relationships
• Avoiding sin and seeking to examine our conscience to discern where we are falling short and where we are responding to grace
• Seeking to understand how God wants us to respond to circumstances in the world around us

That no doubt is not only partial, it may not even be fully accurate, but generally Catholics believe that you have a calling to a state of life, i.e., some sort of vocation.  Maybe you are specifically called to be a priest, monk, or nun.  Maybe you are called to the married life.  Maybe you aren't called to either, but to something else.

I bring (brought)^[2]  this up in the context of the news over the past couple of weeks about Native schools in Canada.

Eh?

Bear with me.

Probably most people who might stop in here have read a bit of this news, but I'll first note that reading a news story like this from a foreign country is inherently confusing, as you always feel like you aren't getting the full story, because you are not.  So, given that, those of us down in the US are only partially informed on this story.

From what you can pick up, and in fact a lot of this has been reported before and isn't new, news, this is the story.

Canada and the US both had, in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, a policy of what we can more or less call forced assimilation. This was a government policy.  The general concept was that it was doing Natives a favor if you separated them from their children, and raised the children in the predominant European culture.

Now, this is obviously a gross condensation of the policy and the deeper you get into it, the less uniform it was.  

In the US, for much of this period, there was a policy of cooperation with religious denominations in this effort.  That varied enormously by location and practice.  It was, for example, pretty extensive on the Wind River Reservation, but not in the way noted above. Children weren't separated from their families, but rather Churches located as missions, with schools, on the Reservation.  At least one, the St. Stephen's school, still exists.  At these schools, children came during the day and went home when school was over.

The big U.S. school was the Carlyle school in Pennsylvania, but it wasn't run by a religion at all, but rather by the Federal government.  This appears to be the pattern that Canadian schools first had.

Canada, however, unlike the US, was heir to the English education system, which was much different.  The United Kingdom in historical terms only went to what we call public education pretty recently, starting with minimal public education requirements in 1880, and only requiring education up to age 14 in 1918.  People with money, in the UK, didn't go to public schools, they went to private schools, and given the social stratification of the time, that meant that the people who counted, so to speak, were those people.  In Ireland, which of course was part of the UK up until the result of the Anglo-Irish War, this meant that nearly all the education was provided by the Catholic Church, which wanted out of it when Ireland became independent but which the government didn't cooperate with, meaning Ireland still largely educates its young through the Church.  In Canada, education worked on a mixed English model, with Quebec being the major exception, as the education there was all private.  Indeed, up until the Quiet Revolution most Quebecois were still educated by the Catholic Church, which the Church also wanted out of in Quebec.  Indeed, often missed in the story of the Quiet Revolution was that it came about, in part, as the Church wanted out of education and running the hospitals.  Ireland would have done well to have learned the Canadian lesson at the same time, but still hasn't.

Anyhow, in the US there was a mixed Native American education model.  Some children were carted away from their families and educated in boarding schools, the most famous one of which was run by the United States government.  Some were run by religious institutions. Other children were educated locally, often by religious institutions, but on a model that's familiar to us today and which didn't involve separation from their families. Others simply weren't educated at all.  And as public education advanced in the United States in the 20th Century, Native American children came more and more into local school districts, some of which, like Wyoming's Fremont County School District No. 14, were almost all Native American by default.

So what's the point here?

Well, generally there's a lot of retrospective horror over this system that both the US and Canada had, and not without good reason.  It seems awful now.  At the time, however, it was generally accepted that Native populations should be subject to forced assimilation through education and that was a good thing.

That was never a good thing, but it was the universal view.  The added part of that, however, is that even if that was the European-North American view of things, neither of the two large North American countries were well-prepared to take the task on.

That probably ought to give us some pause about the educational direction we're forcing on young people today. Does it really suit what's going to make them happy?

I can't really use my own example in this context as it's too old to be relevant, but there was zero effort to provide students with any insight into this topic when I was that age.  Figure it out for yourself was the method that was used, which in my case was really figure it out for yourself.  My father, not without reason, was pretty silent on the topic.  My mother was ill, and her contribution was basically "you can go to any school you want to", with Notre Dame being mentioned as a possibility, probably as a cousin of mine who was a good student, and one year older than me, had gone there.

And that suited him really well.  He pursued a course of study that ultimately lead him to a career as a university professor in a neighboring state.

In my own case, the only suggestions on careers that ever came were from a grade school teacher, who suggested to my parents, or rather predicated, that I'd end up a teacher, the comment from my father as noted, some comments from my mother that "you're good at science", and then a comment from Casper College prof Jon Brady that I was suited for an analytical career as a lawyer.  Brady, interestingly, was a lawyer by training who spent his entire post Navy career as a history professor.  That same view, I'd note, is a view held by a lawyer friend of mine, who felt that the only other career I'd be suited for is that of priest, but then he's German and holds a German view of such things.

Anyhow, that's how I ended up where I am.

I've been thinking.Tomorrow it will be twenty-eight years to the day  that I've been in the service.

        

Twenty-eight years in peace and war, I don't suppose I've been at home more  than ten months in all that time.  Still, it's been a good life. I love India. I wouldn't have had it  any other way.   

But there are times... when suddenly you realize you're  nearer the end than the beginning. You wonder...you ask yourself...         what the sum total  of your life represents...what difference your being there  at any time made to anything... or if it made any difference  at all really.  Particularly in comparison  with other men's careers.    

I don't know whether that kind  of thinking is very healthy...but I must admit I've had some thoughts  along those lines...from time to time.

Col. Nicholson, The Bridge On The River Kwai.

I've been looking out at the legal field now, from a 30-year deep in view. . . .no, that's not true.  

I've been looking at litigation, from a 30-year prospective.

And that's not the same thing.

I've worked almost my entire career, well actually all of my entire career, in litigation.  I can't say that that view is an encouraging one, really.  Conditions have in fact gotten worse, it seems to me.  Lots of attention is paid to the sorry state of American politics but very little to the sorry state of the American justice system, i.e., the litigation system, as people are acclimated to it.

A Catholic saint who left his career as a lawyer to become a Priest remarked to one of his friends that he was leaving the practice, as "there were too many ways to lose your soul" as a lawyer.  I don't know about people who draft contracts, but it's certainly true of litigation.  And it's gotten worse over the years.

It's also something that younger lawyers now generally want no part of, as has become increasingly evident in the post pandemic onset world.  To really find that "glory of the American judicial system" type of belief, you have to be talking to lawyers who are now in their 50s.  Nobody else believes that, and younger lawyers want no part of it.  

That's become increasingly evident to me in recent months.  I look across the deposition table and the faces I see are only a little younger than mine . . . if not older.

Frost wrote on The Road Not Taken.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

John Greeleaf Whittier, in Maud Muller, lamented what might have been.

Maud Muller, on a summer's day,

Raked the meadows sweet with hay 

Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth

Of simple beauty and rustic health. 

Singing, she wrought, and her merry glee

The mock-bird echoed from his tree. 

But, when she glanced to the far-off town,

White from its hill-slope looking down, 

The sweet song died, and a vague unrest

And a nameless longing filled her breast— 

A wish, that she hardly dared to own,

For something better than she had known. 

The Judge rode slowly down the lane,

Smoothing his horse's chestnut mane. 

He drew his bridle in the shade

Of the apple-trees, to greet the maid, 

And ask a draught from the spring that flowed

Through the meadow across the road. 

She stooped where the cool spring bubbled up,

And filled for him her small tin cup, 

And blushed as she gave it, looking down

On her feet so bare, and her tattered gown. 

"Thanks!" said the Judge, "a sweeter draught

From a fairer hand was never quaffed." 

He spoke of the grass and flowers and trees,

Of the singing birds and the humming bees; 

Then talked of the haying, and wondered whether

The cloud in the west would bring foul weather. 

And Maud forgot her briar-torn gown,

And her graceful ankles bare and brown; 

And listened, while a pleasant surprise

Looked from her long-lashed hazel eyes. 

At last, like one who for delay

Seeks a vain excuse, he rode away, 

Maud Muller looked and sighed: "Ah, me!

That I the Judge's bride might be! 

"He would dress me up in silks so fine,

And praise and toast me at his wine. 

"My father should wear a broadcloth coat;

My brother should sail a painted boat. 

"I'd dress my mother so grand and gay,

And the baby should have a new toy each day. 

"And I'd feed the hungry and clothe the poor,

And all should bless me who left our door." 

The Judge looked back as he climbed the hill,

And saw Maud Muller standing still. 

"A form more fair, a face more sweet,

Ne'er hath it been my lot to meet. 

"And her modest answer and graceful air

Show her wise and good as she is fair. 

"Would she were mine, and I to-day,

Like her, a harvester of hay: 

"No doubtful balance of rights and wrongs,

Nor weary lawyers with endless tongues, 

"But low of cattle, and song of birds,

And health, and quiet, and loving words." 

But he thought of his sisters, proud and cold,

And his mother, vain of her rank and gold. 

So, closing his heart, the Judge rode on,

And Maud was left in the field alone. 

But the lawyers smiled that afternoon,

When he hummed in court an old love-tune; 

And the young girl mused beside the well,

Till the rain on the unraked clover fell. 

He wedded a wife of richest dower,

Who lived for fashion, as he for power. 

Yet oft, in his marble hearth's bright glow,

He watched a picture come and go: 

And sweet Maud Muller's hazel eyes

Looked out in their innocent surprise. 

Oft when the wine in his glass was red,

He longed for the wayside well instead; 

And closed his eyes on his garnished rooms,

To dream of meadows and clover-blooms. 

And the proud man sighed, with a secret pain,

"Ah, that I were free again! 

"Free as when I rode that day,

Where the barefoot maiden raked her hay." 

She wedded a man unlearned and poor,

And many children played round her door. 

But care and sorrow, and child-birth pain,

Left their traces on heart and brain. 

And oft, when the summer sun shone hot

On the new-mown hay in the meadow lot, 

And she heard the little spring brook fall

Over the roadside, through the wall, 

In the shade of the apple-tree again

She saw a rider draw his rein, 

And, gazing down with timid grace,

She felt his pleased eyes read her face. 

Sometimes her narrow kitchen walls

Stretched away into stately halls; 

The weary wheel to a spinnet turned,

The tallow candle an astral burned; 

And for him who sat by the chimney lug,

Dozing and grumbling o'er pipe and mug, 

A manly form at her side she saw,

And joy was duty and love was law. 

Then she took up her burden of life again,

Saying only, "It might have been." 

Alas for maiden, alas for Judge,

For rich repiner and household drudge! 

God pity them both! and pity us all,

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall; 

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: "It might have been!" 

Ah, well! for us all some sweet hope lies

Deeply buried from human eyes; 

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away!

Paul Anka definatly wrote, however, about "my way" for Frank Sinatra.

And now the end is here

And so I face that final curtain

My friend I'll make it clear

I'll state my case, of which I'm certain

I've lived a life that's full

I traveled each and every highway

And more, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Regrets, I've had a few

But then again too few to mention

I did what I had to do

I saw it through without exemption

I planned each charted course

Each careful step along the byway

And more, much, much more

I did it, I did it my way

Yes, there were times I'm sure you knew

When I bit off more than I could chew

But through it all, when there was doubt

I ate it up and spit it out

I faced it all and I stood tall and did it my way

For what is a man, what has he got?

If not himself then he has naught

Not to say the things that he truly feels

And not the words of someone who kneels

Let the record shows I took all the blows and did it my way

And Édith Piaf  claimed, likewise, to regret nothing.

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

C'est payé, balayé, oublié

Je me fous du passé

Avec mes souvenirs

J'ai allumé le feu

Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs

Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux

Balayer les amours

Avec leurs trémolos

Balayer pour toujours

Je repars à zéro

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Ni le bien, qu'on m'a fait

Ni le mal, tout ça m'est bien égal

Non, rien de rien

Non, je ne regrette rien

Car ma vie, car mes joies

Aujourd'hui, ça commence avec toi

So what to make of all of that.

Well, maybe they're all correct, in context.  Probably the healthiest view is that of Anka and Piaf, maybe.  If so, it's not one I hold myself.  I wonder what might have been.

People tell me I should not.  But I find myself like Col. Nicholson like that.

Which gets me back, I guess, to the original point of this now overlong essay.  The horrors described in the Canadian example are fairly mis-portrayed, or are to at least some degree, and we know that horrors likewise occurred in the American example that have no religious role in them at all.  And I've earlier written on the example of the Quiet Revolution and its aftermath.  What I suspect, to some degree, all of this tells us is that a lot of people in those examples were not in their real vocations.  They took those ones up for various reasons, but a true calling, at least in some instances, was likely not there.

We can't really expect a calling, for most people, in the secular world.  But inclinations and talents do point us in certain directions.  People discerning a talent for analysis thought I should go into law, something I didn't see in myself.  That habit or inclination is definitely there, however, and spills out constantly on this cyber page.

What I likely didn't and still don't have an inclination for is fighting, which is what arguing really is.  But I've spent a life time doing it now, and apparently am pretty good at.  That brings up another oddity of human nature.  Some people are endowed with talents that they probably realize, but they don't really appreciate in an existential sense.  People endowed with athletic ability, for example, who are disinterested in sports.  People who can argue really well, but don't like arguing.

Even more mysterious is the strong drive towards something that can never be fulfilled, and this too is a central aspect, really, of missed vocations.  Willard Cochrane, an agricultural advisor and economist in the Kennedy administration, worried about the fate of so so farmers, for a lack of a better way to put it.   That is, farmers who were good enough to get by, up until then, but not good enough to get by in the Cold War fence to fence farming regime that the Cold War brought in.  Plenty of people have a deep love of something that is an occupational vocation, in the secular sense, or used to be, but in the modern world, are wholly unable to fulfill it.  People who would have been farmers, ranchers, or whatever, and now cannot be, as the means are not there for most modern people.

Indeed, I think the entire current culture of pet ownership shows that to a degree.  People will pack a dog around to their office jobs or install a cat in an urban office as in a world that better reflected their natures, they'd be around animals all the time. We all would.  In the world we have, we aren't, and we're much the lesser as a result.

Indeed, that gets back to the entire subject here.  I've looked at it in the context of the past.  I.e., women who became nuns as they wanted to be teachers or nurses in Quebec, or men who became Priests as they wanted to be academics.  In my generation and the preceding one, there are lots of men who became lawyers, doctors and dentists because they'd grown up farmers and ranchers, but there was no place on the homestead for them, so they took a professional occupation nearby.

Indeed, also in my generation, and I think in the prior one, the necessity to obtain and keep work was a huge deal, and forms a great deal of the current lack of understanding on the part of these generations and the younger ones.  Having a job was the most important thing about jobs in general.  People sent their children into law, medicine and the like not because they thought their kids would make great lawyers or doctors, but because they'd make money there and those jobs seemed stable.  That no doubt has massively contributed to the large dissatisfaction rate with law that young lawyers have, with some 60% of new lawyers wanting out.

It is, we know, a fallen world.

Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

Genesis 3.

I guess we can't expect much better.

But I think we do.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things...

Thoreau, Walden.

Where does this lead us?

I'm not sure, but I suppose it behooves us to try to find our vocation and see if we have a calling, and to listen to it.  Consider that deeply and wisely.  Pray about it.

Footnotes.

1. This is where the old text starts.

2.  Part of the older text, showing how much time has passed since I first started working on this thread.