There’s a scene from Through the Looking-Glass that’s always struck me—not the tea party or the queen’s croquet game, but the quiet absurdity of the Red Queen’s line: “It takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place.”

A perfect parable for modern life, isn’t it?

We are not just late—we’re chronically, cosmically behind. Behind the version of ourselves we should have been by now. Behind inboxes and algorithms and the endless scrolling pursuit of the Next Big Clarity. We carry clocks in our pockets and wear productivity like armor, but most days we still feel like ghosts in our own story, chasing someone else’s definition of “on time.”

The White Rabbit? He’s not a guide. He’s an anxiety archetype. A trickster in waistcoat and whiskers, ushering us not toward wonder, but urgency.

But calling? Calling is different. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t even ask to be efficient.

Calling is slow fire. It’s the work of a soul returning to itself.

And no, calling has nothing to do with religious beliefs. It’s not a divine job title bestowed from on high. It’s more like a whisper in the bones. A felt sense that your life isn’t a project to be completed but a field to be tended. Not a race, but a rhythm.

The rhythm of calling rarely aligns with the clock. It unfolds in spirals, not steps. In revisits, not resolutions. In mistakes made, mistakes mourned, and mistakes mined for mythic gold.

To be called is not to know. It’s to listen longer.

I often hear the lament: Who has the time these days to do the research, learn, reflect, make a mistake, try again? And I get it. We’ve replaced initiation with instruction, curiosity with content, wonder with hacks. But calling refuses to be rushed. It lives in the spaces between productivity. It hums underneath the noise.

So maybe the real question is not “Who has the time?” but “What kind of time do we want to live inside?”

The philosopher Abraham Heschel once wrote: “It is not a thing that lends significance to a moment; it is the moment that lends significance to things.” That line stays with me. Because the work of a lifetime isn’t measured by output, but by presence. Not by speed, but by soul.

Calling is not a task to complete. It’s a lifelong dialogue. A ritual return. A gentle rebellion against all the scripts that tell us we’re behind.

You don’t answer your calling once. You answer it again and again, each time in a new voice. And maybe the point is not to say, “I’ve done calling. What’s next?” Maybe the point is to say, “I’m still listening.”

Still learning the timbre of your own myth. Still making time for the sacred work of trial and error, falling and re-forming. Still holding space for a life that matters—not in the eyes of the market, but in the marrow of your being.

✍️ Journal This:

• If your calling had no deadline, what shape would it take today?
• What would it sound like if it didn’t need to be productive, only meaningful?
• What truth do you keep postponing until there’s “time,” and what would it take to make space for it now?

You’re not behind. You’re becoming.

And that… is the work of a lifetime.