Did I Miss My Vocational Calling?

My father was a thinker. In my mind, I can still see him sitting at the breakfast table, coffee cup in hand, reflecting on his life. I have inherited his tendency to reflect. One of the things I often wonder about is whether I missed my vocational calling. All my life, I wanted to be a writer, but, instead, I followed my mother's footsteps and became a teacher. Teaching had been her passion... She never wanted to do anything else. Strangely enough, my longing to write encouraged one of my children to pursue a writing career.

"Work is not primarily a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do, wrote British novelist Dorothy L. Sayers. It is, or should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction."

Reading her words, I wonder if she followed her passion. An early feminist, Sayers was already a young woman when my 96-year-old mother was born. She studied at university before women were allowed to obtain degrees. All her life she worked, supporting herself by writing advertisements, while in her spare time, she wrote the detective novels for which she gained fame. A free thinker in her student years, she later returned to her Christian faith and was active in her church.

What did she live to do? I wonder...
 
What do I live to do?

I think about the essays I wrote in school that made me want to be a writer. Over the years I was also drawn to knitting, quilting, gardening, art, travel... Also religious study, exploring my Christian faith.

All these things have given me - and continue to give me - "spiritual, mental and bodily satisfaction."

Is there one word that would encompass them all?! But then, does a vocation need to be only one thing?!