Journaling Prompt: The Longing vs. The Call

Which way are the signs pointing for you?

When I asked subscribers here a while back what they needed in terms of self-tending resources, one suggested more journaling prompts to support them in starting this as a new habit, as well as tips for staying consistent and continuing to write. (Thanks Nikki!) I have been guiding folks young and old around keeping a writer’s notebook for some time, so I loved the idea of offering regular journaling prompts in this space.

Below is a prompt that builds on the posts that have come before in this new year series, about deciding which of your creative castles are worth storming, using mind-body awareness to determine which provincial townspeople of the mind you need to ignore as you do so, and which inner windows feel wide open for you.

Some backstory before we jump in:

This prompt was inspired by my amazing friend Rebecca McLoughlin, and a conversation we had in the mountains above San Francisco, a few months ago. Rebecca and I met at a retreat for people who were a year-plus out from their experiences of pregnancy loss. My experience there was deeply restorative and often joyful — probably not you’d expect from such a thing, but unsurprising to me. One of my favorite small studies is this one, in which a group of bereaved adults described how loss had increased their capacity to give and receive joy, among other things:

There were a number of changes reported by almost everyone, such as a less materialistic attitude, a more positive attitude to death (including a sense that death is not the end), a new sense of well-being, and a new appreciation of (and sense of connection to) nature. The participants told us that they had undergone personality changes too, becoming more open, intuitive, authentic, more self-loving, and compassionate. They also told us that they had new values and goals in life, such as a stronger desire to help others, contribute to the world, and spend more time with loved ones.

Now, imagine a few dozen of these people in a room, dancing to some good music, and you’ve got quite a party. You’ve also got the makings of some truly transcendent conversations, as my grief people have no time or patience for small talk.

Rebecca and I had one such conversation after lunch, about a particular move we were both considering making after the retreat — something that our pre-loss selves wanted very much, but our post-loss selves felt unsure about.

“I feel the Longing,” my new friend told me. “But I don’t hear The Call.”

It was as if Rebecca had just supplied the names of two stars I’d been gazing at all my life, now newly visible in the black sky of our grief. I repeated what she had said, rolled her words around in my own mouth, and felt they were true for me too.

Signs pointing in every direction, at our retreat in the California hills.

This distinction — between The Longing and The Call — connects to what I’ve been talking about this month, about taking the time to determine what goals are actually right for us, on all levels. Not just mind, but body, and soul.

Below, I offer my own journal entry on the subject, and then invite you to try this yourself with a prompt below. (If you’d like to share some of your own insights in the comments, I’d love that! And, it’s also OK if you don’t show your journal to anyone at all, or even if you burn the page after this. Reflective writing is inherently useful because it is healing, even if the writing is only for you.)

The Longing Vs. The Call

To me, some Longings feel more like a Craving. A Craving that comes from the heart, the hands, the mouth. To have, to hold, to taste, to feel. These Cravings are not so much about opening to something that is meant for us on some deeper level, even if it scares us, but the opposite — it is about grasping something that we feel is going to keep us safe in some way.

Some Longings are worth cultivating, because they are for the things that help us ease our suffering and continue our evolution. We Long for love, for family and belonging, for a place and purpose all our own. We Long for peace, freedom, joy.

Our Cravings come and go. Longings are more durable. Some stay for months or years, but they do come and go, sometimes without much consequence. I have spent years Craving things that never did come, and now those feelings are like old friends to me. How sweet and innocent and afraid I was, to believe that I needed that thing in order to feel complete, when in retrospect nothing could have been further from the truth. I can go for days without thinking about those Cravings if I’m deep in creative flow.

The Call feels different. It feels, to me, like it comes from inside of the earth, up through the spine. At first, it tingles at the edges of my knowing. Then, in a quiet moment, it suggests. Over time, it insists.

The deeper Longings inside of me thrill to hear it. They grow stronger.

But sometimes the Call feels scary. I will admit that I have sent more than one to voicemail. As I’ve written before, this is a common pattern in myth: the hero or heroine often resists the Call to Adventure before finally accepting that there is no other viable option.

Why? The Call is stubbornly, sometimes almost gleefully untroubled by questions of logistics, expectations or deadlines in general. It will cut through a coupleship or a career as casually as a river will carve out the heart of a canyon. Human beings do have to deal with the consequences of these things, and they can be unpleasant, at least temporarily. Many of us would prefer these consequences to come at a slightly more convenient time, when we don’t have so much going on.

Sometimes, too, we just don’t have what we need to make it happen.

Elizabeth Gilbert

once told a great story about Tom Waits being hit by melodic inspiration while he was driving, without a way to record it, and him looking up at the source of the Call and saying:

“Excuse me, can you not see that I’m driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen.”

This is basically OK, in my experience. At least at first. Especially if you’re Tom Waits. The Call, I find, is not in a hurry.

At the same time, a Call cannot be forever delayed. Unlike a Longing, its signal becomes stronger and consistent over time. I have free will to answer or not answer, but I am not the boss of The Call. And while there are consequences, sometimes, for answering the call, there are also consequences for resisting.

First, I begin to feel a sense of exhaustion and boredom with everything, even by things that used to interest me and bring me happiness. Then, I get sick in one way or another. Finally, I become depressed and irritable with the people around me. It is as if my soul itself is butting its head up against the fence I’m ignoring, be it self-made or structural. All of my true Longings collapse into one persistent wish that won’t quit: to blow open the gates, in whatever way will allow me to get free.

My first experience with such a Call came when I was frustrated with my life in Boston, and in particular my primary relationship at the time. I lived with a person who did not want to move abroad — but I felt Called. I began to imagine leaving my life in the States by myself and moving to someplace where I knew no one. Eventually, I did it. I broke up with my partner of five years, applied to a job in Seoul, and left the country. Tearing myself out of the life I was living and beginning a new one was one of the most painful psychological experiences I have ever had. And — it changed my life.

To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, that crack was how the next series of Calls came in. From taking a last-minute trip to the mountains with the man who would become my husband, to choosing the treatment that would lead to the conception of my first child, every initiation since then has begun — or ended — with a Call.

The spirit or source from which the Call comes is often quite concerned with children, at least in my experience, though they are not always my own. (Coming to teaching, especially as a career changer, is a common Call for many.) The Call is also interested in creativity, but not with Getting Published per se; it is as easily satisfied by my making a crayon drawing with my child or coming up with a new recipe as it is with me getting a fancy byline somewhere, sometimes moreso. The Call is simply interested in seeing me get free and tell the others.

The source of The Call is perhaps what

Elizabeth Gilbert

is listening to when she writes her Letters from Love. Like Gilbert, I think it thinks I am a bit silly sometimes, but still precious.

It is not an easy thing, being apprenticed to such a thing, but I trust it more now than I ever have. The more I listen to it, the more free I feel. The freer I feel, the more I trust myself to respond to my Big Deal problems with small gestures of care and connection, like planting a new garden in a season of grief or starting this writing project — rather than in destructive fence-busting crescendoes that take the good-enough structures in my life down with the bad. The more I trust myself and my connection to the Call, the more inspired I feel by my projects. The more inspired I feel, the less angry, fearful, sad or soul-hungry I feel on a daily basis.

I have even experienced times in which my thoughts of Craving and Longing ceased entirely, and only the Call was left. By definition, I can’t fully grasp and keep these moments. But as with the stars I saw on that long-ago bright night in the dark hills, I feel lucky to get to drink them in. To experience the momentary clarity of that simple, single-pointed light.

Maybe that is all the Call has ever really asked me to do, anyway. To choose to see more clearly, inside the darkest nights of my endings, the bright lights of beginning that have always been there.

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THIS MONTH’S PROMPT:

How do you relate to Longing?

How do you relate to The Call, if at all?

How do you discern between the two?

When was the last time you responded to a Call?

What happened?

Then what?

What now?

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Related posts:

• When God Said Yes to the Rev. Molly Bolton — an interview in which Molly describes calling off her Christian marriage to explore her queerness in the context of divinity school

• Taking a Sacred Five with Das Rush — on creating “space to sit with the questions” amidst the new demands of parenting a newborn

• Finding salvation in seed-starting — on feeling Called to start a memory garden in grief