I'm one of those people who spent much of his life wondering what I should do when I grow up. I think I believed that there was one shining path that I was meant to walk, and all would be lost and wasted if I didn't find it. The poet Sylvia Plath wrote of watching figs ripen on a tree and being so afraid that she wouldn't pick the right one that they all grew rotten and fell to the ground. That image resonates for me.
A piece of advice I heard somewhere that made an impression on me was that one shouldn't try to do everything. Find a passion, something you are reasonably good at and care about, find others who feel the same, and work with them and stick to it. Christians often refer to this as one's "calling." But you don't need to be a Christian to be devoted to a particular cause, even in the face of apparent failure.
One problem that people like me, an American who has had a pretty comfortable life, commonly run into, is what to do when problems arise while pursuing one's calling. Many Americans are raised to expect happy endings, even if we are working with vulnerable people. As the humanitarian Paul Farmer puts it, we often assume that "all of the world problems can be fixed without any cost" to ourselves. Caring about other people inevitably leads to disappointment and suffering.
But if you truly believe in what you are doing and are collaborating with good people, you can decide that giving up simply isn't an option. One of my favorite fictional characters is the Nigerian headmaster in Helon Habila's
Measuring Time, a man who is determined, against what seem to be impossible odds, to maintain a school for vulnerable children. "This is life," he explains. "There's nothing more." And that's more than enough.
