Breaking Free, Finding Your Calling
Unearthing clues to your vocation in unlikely places
Hi! I’m in the middle of a series exploring what some ancient myths have to say about professional transitions. Here’s where we’ve been:
I Lost My Job. Now What?
Career Disruption & the Middle Way
Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Career
So if you lost your job recently, are thinking of leaving, have been in between work for a while, or walking a creative, self-employed path, you’ll want make sure to stick around. But this week, I’m pausing the series to explore one place to look for clues to your calling—it’s still very relevant to where you’re at, but since no ancient myths are involved, this post is technically not a part of the series.
Let me know what you think!
Your childhood holds clues to your calling.
But, as we grow up, these hints about who we are and why we are here get erased by the expectations of the world around us.
It’s an idea I first heard from activist and educator
who says, “From the beginning, our lives lay down clues to selfhood and vocation, though the clues may be hard to decode.”I haven’t always known what to do with this.
I don’t doubt that it’s true. In fact, I often share this idea with others.
I also don’t have a problem identifying my calling—though, admittedly, I probably think about my calling a lot more than most people.
My issue is just that I just haven’t been able to easily identify and decipher the clues in my past.
But that changed recently.
Last year, when I started teaching meditation in Wisconsin prisons, I found myself asking, How did I end up here?
I mean, I knew that it was the restorative justice work of Marquette University Law School’s Andrew Center that introduced me to the first prison I taught at, which opened the doors for me to teach in many more—now totaling six facilities.
And, sure, supporting incarcerated individuals parallels the community work I was engaged in as a pastor a decade ago when I co-founded Aurora Commons, a neighborhood living room and resource center in Seattle, where we accompanied neighbors who had experienced significant trauma and were dealing with addiction, mental illness, homelessness, and sexual exploitation.
I also remembered the time I visited an Ohio prison when I was in divinity school as part of a group led by Chuck Colson, President Nixon’s Special Counsel and “hatchet man,” who ended up serving seven months in an Alabama prison for his part in the Watergate scandal and went on to found Prison Fellowship.
But, I wondered, Where were the earlier clues—if there were any at all?
It turns out there were clues. And, lining up with Palmer’s statement that they may be hard to decode, they were on the fringe of my life. Subtle. Weird, even…
A couple weeks ago my daughter had a friend over. She texted me asking if we owned Shawshank Redemption on any of the too-many streaming platforms we subscribe to. They wanted to watch it.
Of course we own Shawshank Redemption, I told her. It’s the best movie of all time!
And that’s when it hit me. My love for this movie was a clue to my calling. A bizarre clue? Yes. But also a serious one!
And it wasn’t just Shawshank.
Suddenly, a whole bunch of prison movies and shows I’ve loved flooded my mind.
Tom Hanks’ mystical The Green Mile.
The Rock, featuring Nicolas Cage (my second Nicolas Cage reference in as many weeks—do I get special Substack points for that?), Sean Connery, and—let’s not forget—Ed Harris.
The show Prison Break, which Cherie and I binge watched early in our marriage when Blockbuster, before it was obliterated by Netflix, had its own DVD-by-mail service.
Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn’s Dead Man Walking, an amazing movie that has one of my favorite soundtracks of all time, particularly the song “Long Road” by Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder and Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.
Long Road (Ben’s Version) - Circa 2010, featuring my mediocre guitar playing and my attempt at qawwali singing.
And then there was one of my favorite Unsolved Mysteries episodes of all time about the prisoners who escaped from Alcatraz.
Side note: It turns out that so much in my life can be traced back to something from Unsolved Mysteries.
My interest in movies and shows about prison—with a special place in my heart for the stories about people breaking out of prison—was right in front of me the whole time. I just never made anything of it. After all, it’s entertainment, right? So how could this possibly be a form of my soul speaking to me?
Well, it was. I just didn’t think to look there. I wasn’t paying attention.
When I investigate this clue, I can see now that it isn’t just pointing to my calling as it is being expressed through teaching meditation in prison. It’s saying something even bigger, broader.
Yes, I work with some people who are in prison, literally.
But even more of my work involves accompanying people who are in prison, figuratively.
In my coaching, I often journey with people who appear to have it all together on the surface.
But inside they feel alone. Trapped. Stuck.
They’re locked up in a prison.
By their success and achievements.
By old operating patterns that no longer serve them.
By past wounds that haven’t been tended to.
Yet, beyond these walls, they see glimpses of their fullest, freest life. Happiness. Connection. Purpose. Creative expression. But they’re not sure how to get out.
My age-old interest in escape-from-prison stories is indeed a quiet clue that central to my calling is the work of helping these people behind or beyond bars get free—to find peace, authenticity, and alignment—and to do so by empowering them to discover that they already hold the prison break plan within them.
I’ve been in the prison break business for a while now, so I guess you could wonder if discovering and decoding these clues from my childhood even matters. But I would say it absolutely does!
Because this insight emboldens me to keep going.
It gives me a powerful metaphor to animate my work.
It also invites me to widen my perspective so that I can notice other subtle and strange clues that not only shape my calling right now, but may also have something to say about future vehicles for my vocation about which I’m currently unaware.
So if you currently feel clueless about your calling. If you feel like you’ve lost the thread. Or are not sure about the next step. Remember to investigate your past. All of it. Not just the things you did or hobbies you had. But also the stories and characters that you’ve always been drawn to (even if Nicolas Cage is involved!). Because your soul has always been speaking to you, even—or perhaps, especially—from the fringes of your life.