Your Calling Will Find You

As the sculptor chips the marble he keeps his model
constantly in sight. No stroke of the painter’s brush is made without
reference to his sketch. The author’s every sentence is written with his
outline in mind.

If one of you were cutting a garment you would pin your
cloth to the pattern and be very careful that your shears did not go
here and there aimlessly, or cut a piece too wide or too narrow, or cut
out of proportion or relation to the whole. And yet many a young woman
is trying to fashion that most stupendous thing, a character, that most
marvelous thing, an effective and noble life, without a pattern. Her
shears are running everywhere and nowhere, her chisel is gouging and
defacing, or is idle; her picture has no central figure, or no
consistency.

Such a young woman should begin at once to possess herself
of a pattern! She should stop her aimless and defacing hacking, and
begin to chisel by rule.

Don’t hesitate to set perfection as your standard. If you
never reach it you will get much higher than those whose aims are lower.
And write this sentence in your minds in letters of fire so that they
will become a part of your inmost consciousness: You will never be
larger than your thought.

Little patterns make little productions; uncertain
patterns bring forth uncertain results; half-patterns give
half-realizations. A perfect thing must have a perfect pattern.

Imagination is nearly always spoken of by the unthinking
as a misty and unimportant thing, or is regarded as reprehensible.
“Don’t let your imagination run away with you” is a sentence that has
chilled, if not checked, the enthusiasm of most of us. But imagination
is the master-builder of your most satisfactory life-structure, and when
it “runs away with” you, it becomes the most powerful dynamic in the
world.

What does imagination mean? Imaging, building a
thought-pattern, a mental model, an ideal.

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,”
asserts Emerson. Imagination is enthusiasm’s vital principle, its inward
life, its kindling fire.

We have the electric telegraph and the submarine cable
because imagination gave Samuel Morse and Cyrus Field no rest till the
world-revolutionizing messages were clicked and flashed out in
intelligible signs. We ride, and cook our food, and light our homes by
electricity because imagination gripped Moses Farmer and Edison. The Red
Cross and the White Cross movements, and many other things of worldwide
worth, came into existence because in the minds and souls of such women
as Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale and Jennie Collins imagination
refused to be bridled.

Never be afraid of imagination!

The second rule of life should be: Focus your energies. I
believe it is an entirely demonstratable fact that more failures in life
have been caused by want of direct aim and concentration than by lack
of ability or opportunity. In every life which is to be a success the
less must always be sacrificed to the greater.

It may be urged that there are professions, such as those
of the author, the painter, the musician, that can yield a livelihood
only after years of toil, and that in the meantime a young woman must
engage in other occupations to earn her daily bread. True!

But if she keeps her main object steadily in view, keeps
working toward it in spare hours by the occasional story or sketch, the
sometimes picture, the interspersed hour of music, and by the
conscientious performance of her enforced, bread-winning duties, learns
consecration, and absorbs whatever knowledge comes by her touch with a
side of life different from that which she has chosen, she will
ultimately attain her goal.

In no life can any kind of knowledge come amiss. One must
live worthily and widely before her pen or brush or bow can speak
intelligently and worthily of worthy and wide things.

Clearly, the life I describe is a hard and strenuous one.
But the work one loves, and which is born hers, hard and strenuous
though it may be, is the most satisfying thing which will ever come to
her.

Those who have chosen the careers that have chosen them
will bear testimony to this truth. True living and real achieving can
never be anything but earnest work, but it may be very far removed from
unpleasantness.

And if you watch other lives you will learn, as every
careful observer must, that one bears far less hardship in living the
life of soul-whiteness and effective accomplishment than in trailing out
a careless, heart-spotted existence, which leads to no desirable goal.
The way of the transgressor of any law of holiness, of constancy, of
courtesy, is hard. Life everywhere proves this.

The man who seeks for precious gems digs no deeper, fares
no harder, waits no later, than he who delves after common stones, but
in the end the one with the higher goal holds in his hand not merely a
pretty rock—but a diamond!

Frances Willard, born Frances Elizabeth Caroline
Willard (1839-1898), was one of the most influential women in 19th
century America. She worked tirelessly to bring about social reform in
this country and around the world. Her efforts were instrumental in
securing the passage of the 18th (Prohibition) and 19th (Women Suffrage)
Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Willard was born in Churchville, New York, but spent
most of her childhood on a farm in southeastern Wisconsin. When she was
18, she moved to Evanston, Illinois, to attend Northwestern Female
College. After graduation in 1959, she became an instructor at the
college and was appointed its president in 1871.

Willard helped organize the Chicago chapter of the
Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an organization dedicated to
persuading all states to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages, and
became its president in 1874. Five years later she was named president
of the national organization, a position she held for the remainder of
her life.

In 1883, Willard formed the World’s WCTU and was
elected its president in 1888. Under her leadership, it grew to be one
of the largest organizations of women in the century.