Here’s what Parker Palmer, a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, recently said about his post-PhD journey:
I did a PhD at Berkeley and then immediately decided that academic life was not for me. So I started working my way towards something else, first as a community organizer and then living for eleven years in an intentional Quaker community called Pendle Hill near Philadelphia, a living learning centre where we shared everything and which was arranged as a kibbutz or a commune or to some extent a monastery might be. And friends would ask me, “Why are you doing these things which are so counterintuitive, which are so far from the expectations that we all had of you? We expected you to be a young college president or an outstanding scholar or something like that and you’re in these very marginal places conducting experiments.” And I would always say, “Well, the only answer I can give you is that I can’t not do it. I can’t not do what I’m now doing.” And to me that’s always been a truthful and interesting answer because I’m not saying, “Oh, I’m just wild-crazy about taking these risks with my career, about feeling like I’m disappearing from the known map of the world, about making very little money when I’m helping to raise three children.” But there was something inside of me that I kept listening to that was insistent and that in a quiet and a persistent way said, “You can’t not do this.” And tracking through that, following that lead I think took me eventually to, well, in the words of the old Shaker song, “The place just right.”
From Palmer’s conversation with Tami Simon, 25 Mar 2013, via the Self-Acceptance Project. Listen to the entire interview if you get a chance—the site will let you in return for your email address. It’s a fascinating, wise, lovely piece.
What is your “I can’t not do it”?
