The Creative Calling Series #1 Navigating the Turns in Life: Four Essential Questions

The Creative Calling Series #1:

Navigating the Turns in Life: Four Essential Questions

I am often asked by people questions like this: How did you know to do such and such at that point in your career? I often failed in answering that question. I have historically talked about my passion, sense of call and my willingness to act on what iI thought was next for me?  Let me try to answer that question in this series The Creative Calling:

The book that has guided me throughout my life has been Howard Thurman’s Disciplines of the Spirit.  This book has been the most influential book I have ever read.  In the first chapter Thurman gives us three questions, I added a fourth, that has been the central questions I have asked myself at each juncture in my life’s journey:

1. Who am I?
2. What do I want?
3. How do I propose to get it?

When you sit with these questions, and don’t run pass them, they give you pause. You have to think and reflect deeply.  It is not about what others expect of me.  It is not what they call me.  It is not what I have accomplished but rather, at my core, who am I?  The question is not what I do but rather the question is who am I?

What do you want? Not what others want from you. Not what others expect from you. Not what others need from you but what do you want?

How are you going to get what you want, what you want out of this one life you have to live? This life that is passing each and everyday.  This life we live that we can’t stop the clock on. Each and everyday our life gets shorter as we get yet closer to the end of life. How are you going to use the time you have to get what you want?

Now let me add the fourth question that has guided me:

4. What do you want to create?

As a creative, my writing, photography, teaching, videography and other creative pursuits drive me and give me life.  I enjoy creating, it is in the creating that I honor what the creator put in me.  By creating I honor the gifts and call that God placed on my life while I was in my mother’s womb.  I have to create and I have ask what I want to create and then structure my life to create that which I am called to create.

To structure my life to create that which I am called to create at this point in my life requires I say no to somethings, that I change my life, I let somethings go so that I am free to grow. What do you need to let go of in order to grow? 

I offer these four questions to you.  Take time to answer them through prayer, mediation and deep reflection and let the answers guide your next faithful step.  You only have to take the next step on the journey, one step at a time.  Take the step!

Blessings,

Ralph Basui Watkins, MFA, PhD

“The scholar with a camera!”