“We can live any way we want,” says Annie Dillard in her essay “Living like Weasels,” in Teaching A Stone To Talk. She explains that people take vows of all kinds — of poverty, chastity, obedience, silence; and that all of these paths are selected by choice.

“The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting.”

By doing the practice, by showing up and thoughtfully engaging in your work, your calling reveals itself. Perhaps you believe you are a painter at heart, and after months and years of painting, you must acknowledge that writing, stringing words together, hitching paragraphs into blocks of pages, is your true calling. Or perhaps you are a sculptor, and after building a body of work, see clearly the delusion of this direction: you keep returning to screen-printing, or to video-making, or to cooking, or to teaching, or running, or any number of activities that fully engage you.

By showing up and doing the work, with the kind of suppleness that Dillard recommends, your passions reveal themselves, and your path changes beneath your feet; or you find yourself comfortably walking along the path, which is not changing, but widening, as you stroll. You might find that you hardly notice the path at all as it shifts beneath your feet.

If we wish, we can allow our true calling to court us, to sidle up along us, like an old friend joining us unexpectedly on an early morning hike.