By Daniel Meyers
NetVUE Online Community Coordinator
About a year ago, I found myself in a room with a dying man, surrounded by friends and neighbors who came from many different parts of his life. He never married; he had no children; he had outlived most of his extended family. Yet at the very end of his life, he was surrounded by people who loved him. As we waited, I invited those gathered to sing with me a Taizé song, “Go Now in Peace.” I remember feeling profound gratitude to have gotten to know this man just at the very end of his life. As he took his last breaths, I saw a reflection of what I knew were his core values: a deep commitment to community, selflessness, and generosity. I got to see what happens when someone lives out their values and holds close to their sense of a meaningful life, as this man’s cultivated community surrounded his bed and sang him into the quiet uncertainty of what comes next.
For the past 18 months, in addition to my NetVUE roles, I have been serving as a hospice chaplain for a nonprofit health care provider where I live in southern Oregon. Shifting from exploring vocational reflection with college students to providing spiritual care to patients at the end of their lives might sound like a massive change—and it certainly has been. Still, I quickly noticed that, in some cases, the conversations I have with hospice patients can be remarkably similar to those I have had with college students in my previous roles. The reason, I think, lies in the vocational reflection that grounds both kinds of conversations.
In my work with students, the forward-looking discussion often explores the terrain of possibility, uncertainty, and past trajectory. The hospice conversations look backward and often center on inflection points, changes, blessings, and challenges. Both kinds of conversations have tremendous potential to be beautiful and reflective examples of imagining one’s life in narrative categories. Both sets of “stories” often surface similar topics, questions, wonderings, uncertainties, and commitments. I’ve been asking myself: what does it mean that college students and those at the end of life find similar questions to be equally relevant? So far, I’ve come up with three answers.
First, both experiences accent the enduring value and relevance of vocational questions. Some examples include:
- What kind of contribution have you made, and do you want to make?
- What are your values and commitments?
- How do you (and do you want to) prioritize your time?
- What major challenges do you want to work on overcoming?
- How do you act out a commitment to love? Or justice?
- How do you balance a life of work and play?
- How do you live out personal and communal faith commitments?
- How do you make decisions, know what has been “good,” and evaluate your actions, ideas, relationships, and beliefs?
These questions—which resonate with those just beginning their journeys, as well as those confronting the end of their lives—are of enduring value and continue to prompt reflection across the entire span of our sojourn. Good vocational questions retain their relevance across time and invite a kind of “life review,” capable of yielding vocational treasure.
Second, and as we are all aware: vocational exploration is truly a lifelong pursuit. Deep vocational reflection avoids producing a singular answer; it forms lifelong habits of contemplation, decision-making, action, and further reflection. Students are tempted to make this process more tangible by focusing on moments—choosing a major, selecting a study abroad destination, landing an internship, or securing a first job after college. But as those of us who work at the intersection of vocation and higher education frequently remind our students, gaining clarity on these big decisions represents only a single revolution of a cycle that they will move through again and again. We celebrate with students the outcomes of a particular decision, but we are offering them a process of reflection that they can replicate and refine for decades after graduation. My conversations with the dying have helped me see this lesson as more than a theoretical assumption; it’s simply true. People at the end of life continue to ask what the meaning of their lives has been, what their legacy will be, and what impact they hope to have. Working with folks at any life stage, we want to commend a lifelong vocational reflection process.
Third: accompanying others in these vocational conversations at such different seasons of life has helped me see that tending to a life well-lived helps lessen worry and anxiety about the unknown. And this remains true even with the caveat that, understandably, vocational conversations cause anyone—from college students to those at the end of life—to feel anxious on some level. Some people at the end of life express concerns about their lives as having lacked purpose; as a hospice chaplain, I try to surface these anxieties and explore ways to reframe narratives, set concerns aside, find acceptance, or even explore resolution or reconciliation to help lessen the anxiety. I’ve found that helping people identify and retell their stories of what has been most meaningful to them is a tremendous resource in this regard.
While college students may not have as much life to review as a typical person in hospice, the process of looking backward at any age to identify what has been meaningful builds the narratives that point into the future. Looking backward and remembering a moment of life that carried great meaning often creates great comfort; for college students, it can also help them imagine meaningful lives in their future. Recalling and narrating our vocational moments, even at age 20, affirms the reality of uncertainty while reminding us that we are capable of organizing that uncertainty into a path and giving deeper contours to our lives.
I fully recognize that helping college students to make time for vocational conversations often requires overcoming significant barriers. Nevertheless, I hope this reflection provides a reminder of the importance of this work. As you find your entry points into vocational reflection with your students, remember the gravity of what you are doing; the questions you ask could remain relevant throughout their lifetimes. You teach students a lifelong practice, and some of your moments with them have the potential to shape their interior lives of reflection for decades. You invite students to navigate their anxiety by deeply considering the very thing that often is the source of that anxiety: how to embrace uncertainty, to identify what matters, and to pursue a meaningful life. As you start another academic year, I hope my experiences from the other end of the spectrum of life stories provide a reminder of what a tremendous opportunity we have in accompanying undergraduate students in their vocational exploration.
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