Four Cardinal Points of Right Livelihood
By Rick Jarow, PhD

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Create a sense of vocation to vitalize your work

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To work without a sense of calling is to literally work for nothing. Perhaps the sage, who has become free of any need for meaning, and the fool, who is content as the animal is content, can do this. But for the rest of us, the ideal of vocation ennobles our work, allowing it to shine through the toil and drudgery of our days. It empowers us to sacrifice, struggle, and persevere, to go beyond ourselves, because there is a reason to do so.

Vocation is therefore not a luxury, it is the vital and ongoing connection of our work to integrity, to significance, and to God. Money, fame, good times, and the rest may sustain someone for awhile, but sooner or later the greater part of a person arises and yearns for its call; for the misery, injustice, and unfairness of the world are too much for anyone with an open heart to endure without a working response. And philosophy, dogma, and sophistry aside, there is a place in us that simply knows that there has got to be a greater purpose for all this; not because we lack something or are afraid of some imagined oblivion at the end of it all, but because some relentless energy moves us on toward our calling.

The “creators of calling” often take on ironic appearances. They are not necessarily what I did best on my aptitude test or my fancy of what I might have been good at. A vocation often comes in the guise of misfortune: the death of a parent, the loss of a partner, the challenge to one’s health or very life, or the humiliating experience (not infrequent nowadays) of walking into work and finding the office barred with new locks on the door: for you have just been downsized.

It is not that we seek these things out, (we try so hard to be healthy), but to be called is to be summoned by something greater than our conscious attention. We are often like Blake’s drawing of Isaac Newton (so intent in his own self-drawn circle that he doesn’t see the great ocean of life around him), so something has to jar us loose. Therefore, our calling may appear through an agonizing sense of failure. One man who started his own successful financial planning business told me that he left a secure military position because he wanted to be more than a functionary in the eyes of his family. When I asked a woman who had developed a very successful educational testing service what got her started she said simply, “When my husband left me, I had to do something.”

To be without vocation, however, is to remain chronically weak, to refuse to respond to the feeling of failure or the challenge to one’s life. The chronically weak mentality is always looking for a deal or for a way out of an uncomfortable situation. It compulsively seeks good fortune and goes out of its way to curry favor with this or that person or organization. To “hold” a sense of vocation, on the other hand, is to say along with Walt Whitman, “Henceforth I seek not good fortune, for I am good fortune.”

Vocation, therefore, is not merely about work, it is about the force that aligns our very lives, that gives it purpose and power. And the cardinal points of vocation can become posts of orientation; not “how to” formulae for the weak, but a sane design that can serve to deepen our response to the voices that move us on our paths of life-long learning and open us to the flow of creative wisdom.

I. Dharma - Sacred Obligation

The first and most crucial point to honor in the quest for right livelihood is our sense of sacred obligation. It certainly can be argued that one’s deepest obligation is to one’s self, but as the Quaker educator Parker Palmer has discussed, the spiritual question, “Who am I,” may have to join hands with the equally spiritual question of “Whose am I?” To be born is to be indebted; our very breath is given to us. And one of the most empowering vocational positions, in this regard, is to receive fully the great gift of life, to open to our circumstances down to their core. Therein, the birth of gratitude is possible, and gratitude asks, “How can I respond, how can I give back to all that I have been given?

This giving back, this response to the overwhelming majesty of life, becomes one’s vocation. To honor obligation is to be grounded, it allows one to be trusted, it creates the enormous power that is literally able to change the course of natural events because it is rooted in the most profound recognition of that which holds us all together, the Dharma. On a very practical level, the most sacred obligation in many of our lives may be between parents and children. As baby boomers’ parents grow older and make ready for their next adventure, how are we to honor them? Will we put them out to pasture because they are a burden, or will we honor their richness, their triumphs, and their tribulations?

II. Connection - The Power of Relationship

And as we expand out of the home, we sense our connection to others, to our communities, and to the earth itself. We witness the deep power of the particular; the land that sustains us, the water that nourishes us, this sacred sense of trust with the natural world as well as with the past and future generations. This energy of reciprocity leads to the second guidepost in the mandala of vocation that is community. Not just family obligations are primary, here, but the people who support us, the places we belong to, and the relationships we have forged — all take a center stage. The activist-priest, Dan Berrigan, who was arrested and jailed for his protests against the Vietnam war, once remarked that if you are going to go to jail for something you believe in, you had better have someone baking cookies and coming to visit you with them. No heroic act, no career, no creative leap is ever taken in a vacuum. There are always people supporting us and responding to us.

How can conventional career counseling continue to focus on individual career development without giving equal weight to one’s primary relationships? After all, isn’t it love that we are after, and how can I love if I constantly sacrifice those I love on the altar of work? To be connected, to live with people, to be part of a community is the very ground that makes our work worthwhile. When reciprocal intimacy is lacking, a certain “mud pie fixation” may occur, in which work becomes an arena for proving oneself. “Look at the mud pie I made” is appropriate at age 2 or 3, but not at 37. It is too easy for scarcity and self-hate to put on the face of “achievement” in this regard. When we have others whom we are not simply accountable to, or working for, but who support and are supported by our labor, who breathe with us, our work can become holistic, and born of connection. When the power of community connection complements sacred obligation, we can move toward freedom, the third cardinal point of vocation.

III. The Freedom to Play

In Freedom, the wings of aspiration reveal themselves — not through an adolescent independence that flees obligation and creates end-of-the-rainbow fantasies, but through the real freedom that is won through intent, and through the power of dharma. I am talking about the literal ability to free up our time and to find alternatives to wage slavery in our lives. The Nearings declared in 1950, when they went to live off the land in Vermont, that they wanted to develop a “four, four and four” principle of working: four hours a day for money, four hours on one’s “art,” one’s “vocation” of painting, drawing, or writing, and so on, and four hours in congress with others. Such elegance is far beyond the imaginations of most contemporary workers, who call themselves free, but who are in fact wage slaves. The way out of wage slavery is to first recognize it for the disease it is, like alcoholism and debt. Then one can begin to process the scarcity mentality that keeps us cramming down more and receiving less. As we begin to breathe again, we recognize the value of free time. Creative inspiration cannot be manufactured; it slips in during play, or while wallowing over a over a cup of tea as the light flits through the leaves in the afternoon. One colleague of mine receives insights while taking long showers, and the psychoanalytic writer Erik Erikson formulated the chapters of his ground breaking Childhood and Society over long dinners with friends.

One issue that must be dealt with in this regard is the commodification of the arts; everyone is an artist, everyone would do well to practice an art. Not for the sake of making money from one’s mud pies, but as Balinese are said to do, as a sheer offering to the wonder and beauty of our existence. Children play and we adore their spontaneity while we grow old and brittle — instead of old and wondrously textured and gnarled like the tree Chuang Tzu noticed. The longest lasting tree in the forest was the one that was not good for anything … I challenge “anti-career people” to make a place for play, for music and dance, for story, and for the infusion of the arts of living into the very center of our lives.

IV. Enterprise, Service, Contribution

The fourth and uppermost point on the vocational mandala is our service, our enterprise, our offering to the community. This is what is usually understood by the word “Vocation,” but notice how this is supported by all the other points and emerges out of their integrity. If you take on your obligation, honor your relationships, make time for play and wonder, then your work in the world, your place of contribution, will become obvious. To engage in work as a vocation is to offer your talent, time, energy, and life force where it is needed, and as it is inspired. The pursuit of such vocational alignment will lead you to be in your right place at your right time.

We have been called to make a life on this earth and our service is our response. Work as an offering completes the fourfold grid of vocational integrity and aligns our work with our heart. When our heart stays open in this world, when we make our work into our Life’s Work, no compensation can approach the richness of joy, the depth of love, and the sense of completion that infuses our way.

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Rick Jarow is a professor of history of religious studies at Vassar College, a former Mellon Fellow in the Humanities, Columbia University, and a practicing alternative career counselor. His popular Anti-Career Workshop, which has been offered internationally, is based on years of research and practice with lineage holders in both Eastern and Western traditions. Rick Jarow is the author of In Search of the Sacred; and Creating the Work You Love: Courage, Commitment, and Career.

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