Guided by Starlight: Finding Hope in Vocational Change
In the 90s, I thought that a career was a decently stable reality. In the 2020s, I no longer think that way. And I bet you don’t either.
That vocational skepticism prompted me to ask Dr. Karen Swallow Prior, author of You Have a Calling, to help the rest of us cope with the crazy-fast changeableness of career and life today.
Here’s what I’d like to know: What if we’re not working at our current job for the next ten years? Heck, what if we’re out of work tomorrow? Karen speaks to such questions with (to use her own Thomistic terminology) luminosity. My sense is that the stories she shares in her book are vital for people whose vocational questions feel lonely.
Still, Karen’s stories also make me feel a tension so great I couldn’t quite have named as we were talking. Frankly, she’s so much fun to interview that she makes tensions feel mostly manageable. Professor Prior is a very funny person, even when she’s talking about seriously unstable ground.
But if the conversation with her was fun, the tension I was feeling wasn’t. The tension pulls taut between two poles:
The first pole: we need to be creative and playful with our own work and life, even when the stakes are high.
Don’t settle for what’s always been. Don’t listen to what others have always told you. Instead, try short, bold, playful pilots in your life and work—and see what comes!
Our stories about life and work are too dynamic for us to adopt the dull seriousness of boiled potatoes. Dr. Prior knows this firsthand: she has a story about having just left a job at Liberty University. She has courageously changed the career she thought she’d always be in. She’s had to mentor herself into being curious about her calling in an evolving set of work conditions. (Check out some of her vocational narrative on Substack here.)
Prior’s stories remind me of Anme Laure Le Cunff’s excellent new book Tiny Experiments, which says, in effect: Don’t settle for what’s always been. Don’t listen to what others have always told you. Instead, try short, bold, playful pilots in your life and work—and see what comes! (I’m reading this book after hearing Lee C. Camp interview the author on No Small Endeavors.)
The second pole: we gotta pay the bills and keep our sanity and survive, because the stakes are high.
When things go dark—when we lose our job, when the boss we liked leaves the org, when we feel bored by what we used to love, we need more than our capacity for curious guesswork. We need what the author James Williams calls “starlight”, the values that we navigate by. We need something more than an experimental mindset, in other words.
Or as Festival of Faith & Writing attenders might say, that starlight comes to us through stories.
Karen Swallow Prior narratives offer light. Their stories about the wisdom of permanent (and she would say, universal) values: truth, goodness, beauty. Do you find yourself hesitating at that word “permanent”? Do you wonder if anything holds still in a world whose changeableness accelerates every few weeks? Does your story make those values seem far from universal?
Stay with your stories. But let Karen’s narratives into the mix as well.
The question, What if I lose my job next month? is a scary one, maybe because it brings with it the biggest questions that come with being a person. But stories like Karen’s help you find practical pivots within scary questions.
I hope you’ll listen to this roundtable conversation with Karen (I am joined by my amazing Mode/Switch cohosts). I’m grateful to be listening for callings in company with you.
