By Philip Chanin, Ed.D., ABPP, CGP
Board Certified Clinical Psychologist
Assistant Clinical Professor, Department of Psychiatry
Vanderbilt University Medical Center
www.drphilchanin.com
philchanin@gmail.com

“But when one follows the path of individuation, when one lives one’s own life, one must take mistakes into the bargain; life would not be complete without them. There is no guarantee—not for a single moment—that we will not fall into error or stumble into deadly peril. We may think there is a sure road. But that would be the road of death. Then nothing happens any longer—at any rate, not the right things. Anyone who takes the sure road is as good as dead.
(C.G. Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1962, p. 297)

“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” (p. 318)

“Nevertheless, it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms. It may be that is all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him. He will go alone and be his own company.” (p. 243)

“The Chinese say: ‘Every child is born with a mandate from Heaven.” (personal communication with acupuncturist Peggy Watson)

“Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.” (from Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann, 1921)

As a psychotherapist, I am often sitting with patients who are unhappy with their relationships and/or their working lives. In Thoreau’s words, they are leading lives “of quiet desperation.” Sometimes they are working unfulfilling jobs, and are afraid to leave these jobs. Frequently I will share some words from the famous author James Michener, in his article, “Go Waste, Young Man.” Michener writes, “I wrote nothing until I was forty. This tardy beginning, one might say this delinquency, stemmed from the fact that I had spent a good deal of my early life knocking around the country and Europe, trying to find out what I believed in, what values were large enough to enlist my sympathies during what I sensed would be a long and confused life.”

“I believe that you have till age thirty-five to decide finally on what you are going to do, and that any exploration you pursue in the process will in the end turn out to have been worthwhile. Indeed, it may well be the year that observers describe as ‘wasted’ that will prove to have been the most productive of those insights which will keep you going. The trip to Egypt. The two years spend working as a runner for a bank. The spell you spent on the newspaper in Idaho. Your apprenticeship at a trade. These are the ways in which a young man ought to spend his life…the ways of waste that lead to true intelligence.”

Kenneth Koch, in a poem entitled “Some General Instructions,” writes, “Do not be in too much of a hurry to emulate what you admire. Sometimes it may take a number of years before you are ready, but there it is, building inside you, a constructing egg…nor should you let your need for success interfere with what you love, in fact, to do…The problem of being good and also doing what one wishes is not as difficult as it seems. It is, however, best to get embarked early on one’s dearest desires.” (The New York Review of Books, January 23, 1975)

In a recent New York Times article entitled “A Surprising Route to the Best Life Possible,” (March 30, 2025, page 9) columnist David Brooks writes at length about the the diligent and extensive effort involved in creating a fulfilling life. He states, “When it comes to the things we really care about—vocation, family, identity, whatever gives our lives purpose—we are operating by a different logic, which is the logic of passionate desire and often painful effort.”

“People commit to great projects, they endure hard challenges, because they are entranced, enchanted. Some notion or activity has grabbed them, set its hooks inside them, aroused some possibility, fired the imagination. It is a great and underappreciated talent—the capacity to be seized. Some people go through life thick-skinned…they’re not open to delight, or open to that moment of rapture that can redirect a life. Others have a certain receptivity to them.”

“They are sensitive, impressionable, enthusiastic, absorbent, hospitable. They are open to being surprised, and when that constructive disorientation happens, they stop and contemplate: ‘What am I being called to do here?’”

“What are the kinds of experiences that can kindle a life-altering enchantment? Some people stumble across a group of people who just seem cool, who just seem to be doing something worthwhile. They think: ‘I want to be like them.’”

My own life-altering moment occurred in graduate school in the winter of 1972. I had just obtained a masters degree in Higher Education, as I was working as a Head of Residence in a 22-story dormitory and most of the other Heads of Residence were planning to be college administrators. I had been accepted to the doctoral program. That winter semester I decided to take several courses in the Human Relations division of the graduate school—a course on R.D. Laing and Social Phenomenology, a course on Erik Erikson, and an encounter group course.
The other graduate students I met in these courses were planning careers as psychotherapists. I had an epiphany: “I’m a lot more like these students than I am like my fellow Heads of Residence. I am going to train to become a psychotherapist.”

David Brooks continues, “Other people find their vocation through some contact with beauty—a future astronomer awed by the beauty of the universe, a future mechanic awed by the beauty of a smoothly running engine…In all of these cases, there is a moment of ignition, something outside touching something deep inside; the opening up of new personal possibilities. I think of these as annunciation moments, moments when one is called, moments that prefigure so much of what happens in a life. ‘Where is your Self to be found?’ the Austrian poet Hugo Von Hofmannstal asked. ‘Always in the deepest enchantment you have experienced.”

“I want to understand more precisely what happens when one is gripped by a controlling desire. How exactly does some fervent commitment grow, take over your life and induce you to take on voluntary pain? I guess the process starts in mystery. Like falling in love, these ignition moments happen at the deepest layer of our unconsciousness—that dark region where interests ignite, desires form, the motivational core of our being. This is the part of myself I can’t see easily into. Why am I interested in astronomy but not geology? I don’t know.
Why am I entranced by Rembrandt and left cold by El Greco? I don’t know. Why do I love her and not her? I don’t know. We can’t decide what we’ll order off of life’s menu, but we can decide what we like.”

“The next stage of any calling or vocation is curiosity. When you’re in love with someone, you can’t stop thinking about her. You want to learn all there is to know. Curiosity is the eros of the mind, a propulsive force…You never know where it will take you. One of Vladimir Nabokov’s characters called it the purest form of insubordination. Curiosity drives you to explore that dark cave despite your fears of going down there.”

“It doesn’t take long to hit the next stage of the passionate life: the discrepancy. The seeker notices the vast discrepancy between what she knows about some subject and what she’d like to know, how good she is at some activity, and how good she wants to be. Whether it is ballet, engineering or parenting, the seeker is humble enough to set a high ideal and confident in her ability to close the gap…Whether it’s coding, cooking or gardening, people intrinsically desire to achieve excellence at their craft.”

“When you see people ensconced in their craft, you’ll notice that they are often living what I’ve come to think of as a Zone 2 life, after the exercise trend. They are not manic; they are persistent. They’re not burning out with frantic energy; they are just plowing their furrow, a little bit farther, day after day…They are drawn by some positive attraction, not driven by a fear of failure. They perceive obstacles as challenges, not threats. On their good days, they’ve assigned themselves the right level of difficulty. Happiness is usually not getting what you want or living with ease; it is living, from one hour to the next, at a level of just manageable difficulty.”

“By the time you’ve reached craftsman status, you don’t just love the product, you love the process, the tiny disciplines, the long hours, the remorseless work. When that is your mentality, it alters your attitude toward the suffering involved in the process of growth. The drudgery of the work feels like the unfurling of your very nature—a chef endlessly cutting vegetables, a bricklayer endlessly laying brick. One falls into a rhythm that is characteristically one’s own. Effort becomes its own reward. Mountain climbers often don’t pick the easiest route to the mountain top; they pick the hardest route they can manage, because they value challenge, growth and the fruits of hard effort itself.”

“When you’re committed to some big project, your relationship to pain changes…As Victor Frankl noted decades ago, people can derive meaning from their ability to withstand necessary suffering. Nietzsche famously wrote that he who has a why to live for can endure any how. If you are gripped by a profound desire, you can endure the setbacks but proceed with determination.”

“But I’ve taken us on this journey for a deeper reason, because of a growing sense that this kind of life is the best life to live…I have found that paradoxically life goes more smoothly when you take on difficulties rather than try to avoid them. People are more tranquil when they are heading somewhere, when they have brought their lives to a point, going in one direction toward an important goal. Humans were made to go on quests, and amid quests more stress often leads to more satisfaction. The psychologist Carol Dweck once wrote: ‘Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means that you care about something.”

“All this toil…is about slowly molding yourself into the strong person you want to be. It’s to expand yourself through discipline and grow in understanding, capacity and grace. The greatest achievement is the person you become via the ardor of the journey…Evolution or God or both have instilled in us a primal urge to explore, build and improve. But life is at its highest when passion takes us far beyond what evolution requires, when we’re committed to something beyond any utilitarian logic.”

“The sculptor Henry Moore exaggerated but still captured the essential point: ‘The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your entire life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!’”

I will close this article with a poem entitled “The Journey” by Mary Oliver, from her New and Selected Poems (1992). It speaks to the challenge all of us face in this life:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
‘Mend my life!’
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
Though the wind pried
With its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
Enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
(pp. 114-115)