on the definition of a vocation

I was trying to think of the best way to start this response, and I think that recycling some of Socrates’ own words will prove most effective. Even though “I am simply quite strange to the style of this place,” yet “you shall hear from me the whole truth.” In regards to my education, as well as the external influences in my life trying to dictate my career and my life, “I nearly forgot who I was they were so persuasive.” My path has changed many times over the past few years, and strayed even further from these preconceived notions dating back to my childhood, almost all of which stem from what I felt were the proper ways to be successful. Ultimately, I have decided to pursue what I enjoy doing, studying Classics, despite ridicule and confusion from my peers and most of those whom I consider my mentors. As Socrates said, “I must answer them, gentlemen, and try to get rid of the prejudice which you have had so long,” “but as it is I cannot disperse great prejudices in a moment.” Hence, I found myself resorting to clever one-liners and standby responses about improving vocabulary or preparing myself for some other “suitable” career path through my studies in Classics.

The desire to learn has been with me since my childhood, and I have been conscious of the inherent desire to study and discover almost as long. I have, however, always been hindered by the expectations of those around me. Similarly, Socrates said that “this has been about me since my boyhood, a voice, which when it comes always turns me away from doing something I am intending to do, but never urges me on.” The doubts of others and their misgivings began to seep into my own mind, and their mistrust turned into my own, preventing me from pursuing that which I consciously desired.

Socrates feels that this vocation is not something he decided to do, but rather something he was intrinsically destined to pursue, “maintain[ing] that I have been commanded by the god to do this, through oracles and dreams and in every way in which some divine influence or other has ever commanded a man to do anything.” He believes that through his inquiries he “might benefit each man separately with the greatest possible benefit,” and that without his presence and his vocation, “you [all] can go on sleeping for the rest of your lives, unless God sends you such another in his care for you.” It is his purpose to show “that life without enquiry is not worth living for a man [. . .] yet all this is true, gentlemen, as I tell you, but to convince you is not easy.”
His vocation is not something that is understood easily by his peers, which is best exemplified by his logic concerning how he should be punished once he had been found guilty. Those trying him already feel that his guilt lies in his abnormal vocational pursuits, so he asks, “What is proper for me to suffer or to pay, for not having the sense to be idle in my life, and for neglecting what most people care about, moneymaking and housekeeping and military appointments?” Socrates even goes as far as to say that “then I did not think I ought to do anything servile” and that “it was lack of effrontery and shamelessness, and of a willingness to make you the sort of addresses you would have liked best to hear” that resulted in his so-called guilt. There are plenty of people out there trying to become something predefined by their peers and their families as the proper path, “plenty of [whom] believe they know something, when they know little or nothing” or are even “pretending to know when they know nothing.”

One of the sections that struck me the most also proved most relevant to my own pursuit of my “calling” of sorts in the classics:

They knew what I did not, and here they were much wiser than I was

[. . .] but because they could manage their art well, each one claimed
to be very wise in other things also, the greatest things, and this fault of
theirs appeared to obscure their real wisdom.

Being cognizant of the unconventional nature of studying the Classics as a career choice, and seeing the shortcomings of those who feel they are wise and justified in their choices without understanding what may prove to be ulterior motives or outside influences shaping their decisions, allows me to fully realize why I want to be a lifelong learner, and why I want to continue filling my life with knowledge of eras past.

“So I am wiser than he is by only this trifle, that what I do not know I don’t think I do.”