Callings in Life
Originally Written September 30, 2009
Dear Readers,
Sometimes it’s hard to know your calling in life. For me, I passion for languages. Just the act of acquainting myself with another language gives me a sense of joy that few other things do. It’s hard work, it takes a long time, and it can become painful or dull at times. But I love it. At the moment I’m learning French by working my way through a translation of “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown and a French course to help me with the pronunciation. I’ve been seeking out resources for several languages recently, and look forward to seeing what else I’ll have the chance to learn in my life. Sometimes people ask me what I plan on doing with all the languages I learn. I suppose it might be foolish of me, but I don’t always think ahead of learning them. They give flavor to my life even if I am just getting to know the grammar and idiomatic uniqueness. I don’t know how many of them I’ll actually ever use in my life. Ideally, I’d love to use all of them, but I don’t know how. I don’t know if I will.
It seems to me that I’ve been given a gift with languages. I may have something of a talent for learning them, and I do believe in such a thing. But I think that the passion is more important, and the hard work you put into learning something is still more important. The love I feel for languages is the gift I’m referring to.
A few times in my life I’ve wondered if I’ll ever lose my passion for languages. I can remember three times in life, all of them thankfully relatively short-lived. Once was in Germany. I don’t recall exactly what happened, although I know wrote about it on my blog at the time. Eventually it passed, this lull. And then again when I had just graduated from college. I remember this more clearly. I was also trying to learn French, and I think the method and literature I was using were serious factors in wearing me out, because they just weren’t interesting methods for me to learn with. I ended up taking the summer off from study, rebooting my interest and instead flirting with a Navajo dictionary and course book, without making any real attempt to absorb new words. Even in that phase though I started to theorize different methods I could use to learn.
And then a couple of weeks ago marks the most recent downtime. My interest mostly all back at the time of writing, if it was ever gone. But it bothers me every time this feeling rolls around. As if I might grow out of something. It’s not like growing out of playing with toy cars or a type of music, though. A passion isn’t just a phase. It’s a way of life. Lives of course can change. Relationships are always in change, in growth. I used to want to go into filmmaking. I had real dreams about that, and that changed for me into languages. I turned out fine. But this is something I don’t want to lose. I don’t know if I ever will, but the idea of it is so profoundly disturbing to me, to even think about it would make me wonder what I had left. If a person loses something they love, it’s not like just having your house burn down or your car stolen or something else that’s devastating. Both of those can be awful events in a person’s life, and I thankfully have not had to endure either of those. But when a person loses a passion, that must be like losing part of your soul. I’ve told people how I love to write. But it doesn’t compare to how I love the sounds and grammar and symbols of other languages. It helps fuel my imagination. I guess, though, what relationship doesn’t have its hard times, right?
It’s silly really, but I read about a Greek fellow who completely absorbs a different culture and through that he learns the language. He’s learned over thirty languages in his life, I believe. The silly part is that when I read about him, I started to question my own devotion to my hobby. He said that he found vocabulary and grammar boring. Instead he loved the culture. For me, the main thing I look about in a different culture *is* the language, and if I find their language enticing, I have much higher chances of wanting to learn about them more. And usually to see if there is some I can learn how to speak like them. And although I find highly technical grammar written in linguistic jargon nearly unreadable and vocabulary lists to sometimes be dry, I still love grammar and vocabulary. So in other words, I started to feel very self-conscious about what I look for in languages, and presto, lull number three in my life.
Frankly, I compare myself too much with other people. This is probably a common problem with people, though. Maybe we’d all feel reassured if we compared with each other how often we compare ourselves to one another, although since that almost never works, we might end up feeling more miserable. And that would suck, wouldn’t it? Maybe we ought to stop giving a damn about what other people think. I don’t advocate being self-absorbed jerks, but hopefully a person doesn’t need to be a jerk just to be themselves. It’s scary though because no one can really do it for you. You have to be you.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these questions. About these questions with languages and how they tie into even bigger issues, more universally human issues, one could perhaps say. But I think finding a passion is a key move to being yourself. Maybe a passion is a calling, even if that calling isn’t a job. I don’t know what I am called to do in life. I figure I have such a love for languages, but I don’t know how to incorporate that. I don’t think teaching or linguistics is for me. I’m almost certain on that, actually. Nor am I sold on interpreting or translating, at least full time. But languages are about communicating with folks. I said that I get most of my joy out of learning a language, and constantly adding to it, the way I add details to pictures or added Lego models when I still played with Legos. But beyond that is communication. Maybe somehow that’s what my calling is.
Or maybe I’m wrong about it. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a wonderful hobby and I’m actually meant to be a fisherman off the coast of Canada. It was the first job that came to my mind. But even if I were in Canada, I’d still be looking for chances to use my French, not to mention look for grammars and dictionaries and texts for Ojibwa, Stoney, Inupiaq, Wampanoag, and other such colorful tongues…It’d be one of the foremost things on my mind.
Hope all is well.
Tristan
Dear Readers,
Sometimes it’s hard to know your calling in life. For me, I passion for languages. Just the act of acquainting myself with another language gives me a sense of joy that few other things do. It’s hard work, it takes a long time, and it can become painful or dull at times. But I love it. At the moment I’m learning French by working my way through a translation of “Angels and Demons” by Dan Brown and a French course to help me with the pronunciation. I’ve been seeking out resources for several languages recently, and look forward to seeing what else I’ll have the chance to learn in my life. Sometimes people ask me what I plan on doing with all the languages I learn. I suppose it might be foolish of me, but I don’t always think ahead of learning them. They give flavor to my life even if I am just getting to know the grammar and idiomatic uniqueness. I don’t know how many of them I’ll actually ever use in my life. Ideally, I’d love to use all of them, but I don’t know how. I don’t know if I will.
It seems to me that I’ve been given a gift with languages. I may have something of a talent for learning them, and I do believe in such a thing. But I think that the passion is more important, and the hard work you put into learning something is still more important. The love I feel for languages is the gift I’m referring to.
A few times in my life I’ve wondered if I’ll ever lose my passion for languages. I can remember three times in life, all of them thankfully relatively short-lived. Once was in Germany. I don’t recall exactly what happened, although I know wrote about it on my blog at the time. Eventually it passed, this lull. And then again when I had just graduated from college. I remember this more clearly. I was also trying to learn French, and I think the method and literature I was using were serious factors in wearing me out, because they just weren’t interesting methods for me to learn with. I ended up taking the summer off from study, rebooting my interest and instead flirting with a Navajo dictionary and course book, without making any real attempt to absorb new words. Even in that phase though I started to theorize different methods I could use to learn.
And then a couple of weeks ago marks the most recent downtime. My interest mostly all back at the time of writing, if it was ever gone. But it bothers me every time this feeling rolls around. As if I might grow out of something. It’s not like growing out of playing with toy cars or a type of music, though. A passion isn’t just a phase. It’s a way of life. Lives of course can change. Relationships are always in change, in growth. I used to want to go into filmmaking. I had real dreams about that, and that changed for me into languages. I turned out fine. But this is something I don’t want to lose. I don’t know if I ever will, but the idea of it is so profoundly disturbing to me, to even think about it would make me wonder what I had left. If a person loses something they love, it’s not like just having your house burn down or your car stolen or something else that’s devastating. Both of those can be awful events in a person’s life, and I thankfully have not had to endure either of those. But when a person loses a passion, that must be like losing part of your soul. I’ve told people how I love to write. But it doesn’t compare to how I love the sounds and grammar and symbols of other languages. It helps fuel my imagination. I guess, though, what relationship doesn’t have its hard times, right?
It’s silly really, but I read about a Greek fellow who completely absorbs a different culture and through that he learns the language. He’s learned over thirty languages in his life, I believe. The silly part is that when I read about him, I started to question my own devotion to my hobby. He said that he found vocabulary and grammar boring. Instead he loved the culture. For me, the main thing I look about in a different culture *is* the language, and if I find their language enticing, I have much higher chances of wanting to learn about them more. And usually to see if there is some I can learn how to speak like them. And although I find highly technical grammar written in linguistic jargon nearly unreadable and vocabulary lists to sometimes be dry, I still love grammar and vocabulary. So in other words, I started to feel very self-conscious about what I look for in languages, and presto, lull number three in my life.
Frankly, I compare myself too much with other people. This is probably a common problem with people, though. Maybe we’d all feel reassured if we compared with each other how often we compare ourselves to one another, although since that almost never works, we might end up feeling more miserable. And that would suck, wouldn’t it? Maybe we ought to stop giving a damn about what other people think. I don’t advocate being self-absorbed jerks, but hopefully a person doesn’t need to be a jerk just to be themselves. It’s scary though because no one can really do it for you. You have to be you.
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these questions. About these questions with languages and how they tie into even bigger issues, more universally human issues, one could perhaps say. But I think finding a passion is a key move to being yourself. Maybe a passion is a calling, even if that calling isn’t a job. I don’t know what I am called to do in life. I figure I have such a love for languages, but I don’t know how to incorporate that. I don’t think teaching or linguistics is for me. I’m almost certain on that, actually. Nor am I sold on interpreting or translating, at least full time. But languages are about communicating with folks. I said that I get most of my joy out of learning a language, and constantly adding to it, the way I add details to pictures or added Lego models when I still played with Legos. But beyond that is communication. Maybe somehow that’s what my calling is.
Or maybe I’m wrong about it. Maybe it’s just supposed to be a wonderful hobby and I’m actually meant to be a fisherman off the coast of Canada. It was the first job that came to my mind. But even if I were in Canada, I’d still be looking for chances to use my French, not to mention look for grammars and dictionaries and texts for Ojibwa, Stoney, Inupiaq, Wampanoag, and other such colorful tongues…It’d be one of the foremost things on my mind.
Hope all is well.
Tristan
posted by Tristan | 8:58 AM
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