murakami as vocational guide

In Novelist as Vocation, Murakami talks in his curious, plainspoken way about the life of a fiction writer - a historically successful, internationally famous, ostensibly wealthy fiction writer. He’s not pretentious or precious about the subject matter (or about his remarkable success). 

One thing I like is how he talks about running, in this book, which is about writing (he has another book about running). He says that physical fitness is quite important for a novelist. He runs an hour a day. 

He’s explicitly doing this to strengthen himself, physically and mentally, for the work of writing.

But he also says something about it that I think is almost as vocationally important as the whole rest of the book’s advice about writing. 

Of running, he says, “I feel like the act of running represents, concretely and succinctly, some of the things I have to do in this life.” (italics in original)

I wonder what you write under that heading, if you had to make a short list. What are the recurring actions, the activities, that are things you have to do in this life? (nb: this is not a bucket list.)

Murakami’s not talking about and I’m not asking about your passion, or your dream. It’s not a question of your occupation. What he says about running sounds more to me like a pre-occupation. 

Rather than a top down approach, where you try to choose a line of work, a professional identity, and then take on all of its subjacent activities, I wonder what you might find if you went bottom up. You identify a few activities, things you could readily do every day, things you might feel impelled to do. And you then give a name to that set of activities considered as a composite whole - that name could be a profession, a line of work.

-Eric