The people around me always said that the best thing for me was to make as much money as possible and save it for retirement. That, they said, was the key to happiness and security. This always seemed to be a dreary, unimaginative, and boring way to live.

Life was a fight for me until I discovered what it was that was burning to be released, and was imprisoned, and was eager to be released inside of me. I could feel it.

When I found that gift, that skill, that talent, it felt like the magic inside of me. I found my soul waiting for me. Prestige never matters to me, nor does a lot of money, and my own instincts tell me that rich people are rarely happy and are obsessed with doing more.

What I do best, I decided, is what I was meant to do in life. That is my talent. Talented people, I saw, don’t sit in the darkness forever; they light a candle, wrote some theologian, “then light a candle that others can see.”

If you follow religion, you will read one place or another that God gave all of us the creative spark, something no other animal has. This is the gift within me, the only one that gives birth out of the deepest center of my life.

Some poet wrote that “Talent – that’s God’s finger on the shoulder.” It’s a sin, he is quoted as saying, to neglect it.

I have learned in old age that the call often comes late in life, something to look forward to if we weren’t bombarded with deathly gloom about aging. Writing has always been my job, my purpose, my call. I’ve never looked anywhere else.

I have always felt it since childhood. Someone’s seed inside changes. The call comes, often after many years, quietly and out of nowhere.

Something new rises in the soul.

And then it is time to answer. And then takes on meaning and purpose.

It’s that simple.

It’s that hard.