Deciphering what your next creative calling is
How do you know what's next in life?
“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I am living for, in detail, ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” ― Thomas Merton
When I was in my early twenties I kept collage journals. Spiral bound, hard cover, they housed my visions for life. I’d hoard clippings from newspapers, magazines, pages torn from books I’d bought at the thrift store.
Late at night I’d retreat to my upstairs bedroom with the blue walls and the pitched, white-washed roof. I had an IKEA trestle table for a desk (which I covered in a roll of paper for scribbling down ideas) and a black clip lamp which made little pools of warm light.
While everyone else watched television downstairs, I spent hours with scissors and a glue stick. In those darker hours, I built visual landscapes: dictating to my soul, or the gods, how I wanted my life to go.
And it wasn’t just one page, it was an entire narrative — page after page of self-organized imagery that elicited a particular emotion or a stirring from my soul.
These collage books weren’t offering me visions of what I thought I should want. They were written directly from my soul about how I wanted life to feel. I knew I was creating a lived life, not a static one. It wasn’t a fixed vision, but a moving one.
This was how I navigated the world, how I chartered the impending ocean that spread before me. This was my compass and my cornerstone.
This was how I knew who I wanted to become.
These days, things look a little different. I have Pinterest for mood boards and ChatGPT to ask questions about what to do next. But back then, I only had attunement — both to myself and the field beyond me.
And though I don’t make these books anymore, I realize what I was doing was an important skill to learn — one they don’t teach in school.
Having checked boxes my entire academic life, I assumed adulthood would arrive with instructions. That clarity would descend automatically. That authority figures would hand me a life that fit perfectly.
Much to my surprise, the path didn’t magically open up before me as soon as I turned twenty one.
Instead, something surprising happened. I had to learn how to sail, how to read the tide, how to pay attention not only to the wind, but to the deepest yearnings within me.
The truth is I never wanted to build a life of monotony and predictability. I wanted adventure. I wanted to discover things and be surprised, but most of all, I wanted to discover and be surprised by myself.
Think about it — there’s a terrain we will never be departed from, which is unfathomably deep and interesting, and it lives within you.
No adventure on the planet can come close to exploring what your own potential might be.
So what’s next? How do we read the unfolding landscape within us and begin to sketch a map? How do we know who we want to become and how to get there?
Last Sunday our son turned twelve. As he approaches new thresholds and we prepare him as best we can for the future, we have been asking ourselves these questions:
what are we optimizing for in his future?
what kind of person do we dream he will become?
He is homeschooled, which was a choice we made after he started kindergarten in the fall of 2019. From March 2020 on, he spent two years learning at home with a retired school teacher in her 70s. After reintegrating into the public school system in 2021, I watched his light begin to dim.
We gave him the choice to continue with standardized testing, homework and fluorescent lights OR, he could start a new chapter at a self-directed learning center called Rock Tree Sky.
He has blossomed, plays four instruments, can make a knife from a horseshoe and hold an adult conversation, and but there isn’t a day that passes when we wonder if he’s missing out on something, is he is learning enough, and if 7th grade algebra is really that important?
When I think about him in five years, I think about the tools I want him to be equipped with. Tools that you can’t buy in a store or outsource to AI, but qualities you can cultivate from a young age, and that will last a lifetime.
As I thought about these skills, I realized they are also essential elements for building a meaningful life at any age.
More than anything he could learn from a book, I want him to:
