This Indian man, known as "Muthu", has spent 60 years in servitude to his white, aristocratic mistress, a vocation without which "his life would have little purpose".
This early rejection has continued to haunt her, feeding her fear that she might have "inherited a flawed legacy", like her artistic father, afflicted with "a vocation without the competence to sustain it".
Now that I'm back from CCDA, I feel like I can breathe again and pursue my vocation without sacrificing who I am.
Without a personal vocation, you can sell your business and buy another business or quit your job and find a new one many times over and still find yourself in the same place.
A former addict becomes the best drug counselor; the cancer survivor who told me he'd never have found himself and his true vocation without the disease he received (he was thirty when I met him).
Many pampered noblewomen entered monastic life accompanied by feather mattresses and luxurious linens but without a sense of vocation.
I can't imagine living that life without a sense of vocation, I say, almost a compulsion to bear witness.
It is getting increasingly difficult to recruit and our roles are continually changing, which is deeply sad because it is without a doubt a vocation: you simply wouldn't do it otherwise.
They know their soul mate or place to bliss or vocation all without the benefit of test or trial because they fear they will get disconfirming feedback.
The title comes from Miu's confusing the word "beatnik --what Sumire aspires to beatnik --whatame of the first Soviet satellite, which translates as "traveling companion". Without the person or vocation they love, Murakami's characters conclude, they too are like "a poor little lump of metal, spinning around the Earth," tethered beatnik --what gravity.
