I watched a 60 Minutes interview with Dereck and Beverly Joubert, a South African accented but seemingly nationality-agnostic married couple who make wildlife documentary films and advocate for wildlife conservation, especially as it concerns their adopted genus Panthera (lions, leopards, etc…). That familiar but unnameable 60 Min. narrator strongly hints that public interviews with this stupendously photogenic couple are as rare as some of the true wonders they’ve caught on camera over their 25 year career, which include:

A leopard nurturing an infant baboon with great care throughout the night after it savagely killed the mother; An adult elephant being attacked as actual prey by a pride of lionesses, and surviving; and A breed of aquatic “super lion” — visibly blubbier and 15% heavier — which specializes in water buffalo.

They spend their day in the African bush tracking, observing, and occasionally filming big cats. They travel atop one of the few off-road vehicles to be used in the intended manner. They live in a handmade house and bathe in a copper vessel and drink tea out of tin mugs on a porch where wild elephants pass with more regularity than postmen. Dereck is asked what it’s like to be charged by a lion and he answers in a measured South African tone and without any ironic understatement: “eet is quite drumatick.”

The interviewer has a Barbara Walters-like instinct for delivering the home viewing goods, and veers the topic away from conservation and into romance novel territory. How did they meet? How did they get into this business? “We fell in love and knew we wanted to be in Africa.” And, “this is our calling.” This would all be almost farcical if it weren’t for the fact that they make films good enough to let us see why it’s not. I’ve most recently viewed the Jeremy Irons-narrated Eye of the Leopard. It’s inspired work, it’s emotionally genuine and primal, and it’s quite evidently the product of love and calling. The latest, The Last Lions, also narrated by Irons, contains a scene of such raw emotion that I decline to describe it.

Nothing stirs my anxiety more than being in the presence, or in this case tele-presence, of people who can speak such noxious cliches as having found a calling or pursuing passion rather than money, and really truly mean it, not as a belief or lofty goal, but as a series of apparently obvious decisions actually made, now reaping benefits way beyond my daily experience. To glimpse this sort of authenticity is to make every moment of daily reality — reading the sign for the next subway arrival, crafting an office e-mail with cover-your-ass elements for twenty minutes — each seem as if a tragic failure, a betrayal of the wonder of existence itself. Every non-Joubert person around me seems by contrast flat and somnambulant, which is merely uninspiring when they are strangers, utterly deflating when they are relevant to my life.

I’ve always struggled with this, and the bastion I am able to hold is a deep suspicion of the very desire to find a calling After all, semantically, a calling should find me. I’m not so sure we need a calling, so much as we need to press onwards in this moment. This is an entirely different discussion, but it suffices to say that I hold deep reservations about people who, rather than pursuing a passion, pursue life as if it must be a pursuit of a passion, as if grinding it out weren’t in its way a completely authentic sampling of life-on-Earth. I think the true prescription for this malady of mine is a sense of absurd humor, best illustrated by Gary Larson’s Edgar, who actually finds his purpose hidden under his couch cushion.