The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  It is, therefore, the sacred duty of every individual human soul to be utterly and completely itself—to be that jewel at that time and in that place, and to be that jewel utterly. It is in this way—merely by being itself—that one jewel holds together its own particular corner of Space and Time. The action of each individual soul holds together the entire net. Small and large at the same time.

  In another great Hindu scripture—The Mahabharata (the great epic poem of which the Gita is a part)—Krishna teaches about dharma: “Dharma upholds both this-worldly and other-worldly affairs,” he says. Krishna here introduces a fascinating new dimension to dharma. Dharma upholds and expresses the order, harmony, and essential nature of individual beings in the world, and at the same time upholds an unseen inner world order. (It is this order and harmony that had been threatened on the field of Kurukshetra, and that could only be saved by Arjuna’s faithfully playing his small role—just as Thoreau would later play his.)

  Our actions in expression of our dharma—my actions, your actions, everyone’s actions—are infinitely important. They connect us to the soul of the world. They create the world. Small as they may appear, they have the power to uphold the essential inner order of the world.

  6

  Thoreau discovered this principle through his own experience, and through his close examination of nature and of life. Sitting in the center of his own axis mundi at Walden, he was lit up with the energy of the cosmos. It all poured out in his writing. For two and a half years, Thoreau unleashed upon the world a torrent of words. Says his biographer Robert Richardson Jr., “[Thoreau] produced more writing of higher quality over a greater range of subjects while he was living at Walden than at any other period of his life. In twenty-six months, he wrote two complete drafts of A Week, a complete draft of Walden, a lecture on his life at Walden, a lecture essay on Thomas Carlyle, and the first third of The Maine Woods.”

  In unleashing his own freedom, Thoreau did free a million slaves. He discovered that his authentic words had real power. When written from “the immoveable spot” they could, indeed, change the world. In the essay On Civil Disobedience, Thoreau outlined the justification for active resistance against both the immorality of slavery and the futility of America’s war with Mexico. This powerful document has reverberated through history since: It directly inspired the actions of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela. And it has inspired generations of Americans to be themselves.

  The fact that Thoreau’s trek to Walden was such an altogether homespun experiment makes us love him all the more. As it turns out, his exotic experiment took place a scant mile and a half from home. Recently, scholars have discovered that his mother often brought him cookies and sandwiches. His experiment was only about two steps beyond sleeping in the backyard in a tent. It was not heroic. And, of course, he never claimed that it was. It was a small act, and that smallness was the very source of its virtue—the secret source of its largeness. Later on, capturing this paradox perfectly, he would say about his inner and outer peregrinations, “I have traveled extensively in Concord.”

  It is fascinating to watch Thoreau at Walden Pond begin to take full ownership of his idiosyncratic rhythms. It was at Walden that he came to know and to embrace the ecology of his inner life. He spent his mornings reading the great European authors: Goethe, Carlyle, Schiller. And in the afternoons he sallied forth, “sauntering,” as he said, for walks that could last well into the evening. He lived a thoughtful, intellectual life, but also an appealingly simple one. There was no attempt at heroism here. No grandiosity.

  Finally, Thoreau was able to fully declare himself—to clearly name and celebrate his dharma: “I am a mystic, a Transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot,” he declared. It was not easy to declare oneself a mystic in nineteenth-century Concord. In most people’s minds this translated directly into “loafer.” Still, having claimed his dharma and having felt the power of this act, he could now give his advice with authority: “Do what you love!” he wrote exuberantly. “Know your own bone: gnaw at it, bury it, unearth it, and gnaw it still.”

  Know your own bone!

  7

  Ellen’s task, now, at midlife, is to know her bone—her gift for caretaking. And knowing it, to see its true largeness. For that, she will need help. She will need mirroring. I try to do this for her when I can.

  Recently, I went with Ellen to visit Jane, a centenarian of whom Ellen has charge. Jane lives alone—at one hundred and two years of age—in her own second-floor walk-up. This little apartment was designed and decorated sometime in the late fifties, and nothing has changed. It is fitted out with aging wall-to-wall shag carpet of an orange color that any of us who lived through the 1960s will recognize. There is the inevitable knotty pine “early American” furniture, with lots of fabric wreaths and lime-green ceramic lamps shaped like dolphins. There is the faint smell of urine. There is plenty of dust.

  And there is one-hundred-and-two-year-old Jane. Puttering around in her housecoat, drinking coffee and leafing absentmindedly through a stack of papers. There on the kitchen table are her many bills—which she is obviously paying herself, thank you—and a neat list in a notebook of bills paid and unpaid. (Why do we assume that the elderly cannot do these things for themselves?)

  Jane takes us for a tour of the apartment. Kitchenette. (Also knotty pine.) Bathroom. Old-person smell. Bedroom. White-painted furniture and more shag carpet—turquoise this time. While we’re in the bedroom, Jane remembers something she wants to give to Ellen, and opens a top drawer of her bureau. As she does so, inexpertly, the whole bureau begins to tip in Jane’s direction. Ellen flies into action. She catches the bureau in her powerful nurse’s arms. She sits the shaken Jane down on the bed to make sure she is all right. Then she makes a joke of the whole thing. Fifteen minutes later, when Ellen refers to this incident, Jane says, “Well, that never happened. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Ellen just laughs, and opens a probiotic-rich yogurt for Jane to taste.

  All the while, I’m watching Ellen. She’s lit up. She’s having fun. She is goofing on Jane, and on the whole scene, throughout, but in the nicest way. She is taking care of little things unobtrusively. She cleans up a spill in the bathroom. As we prepare to leave, she touches Jane tenderly, smoothing back her hair. Jane squeezes her hand. “What would I ever do without you?”

  Ellen chuckles as we walk back out to the car. I observe to myself, OK, she really is lit up. There are the shining eyes. She is not just making this up. She’s not just doing this out of obligation, or to be a good person. She genuinely likes this stuff. Taking care of Jane would make me crazy. I would be full of resentment within half an hour, and would be fantasizing about sending her off to the nursing home within two days’ time.

  My ongoing dialogue with Ellen has helped me to realize something: I never really liked helping, even though—strangely—I chose “the helping professions.” I didn’t even like that term: helping. Thoreau said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.” Yes.

  But Ellen is completely herself when helping. There is none of the forced helpfulness that would characterize my efforts. This is what a real caretaker-soul looks like, I thought. This is why we all have to have different dharmas. Every base is covered somehow, but only if everyone acts on their authentic calling. Only if everyone holds together her part of the net.

  On another occasion, I helped Ellen with a yard sale—schlepping mountains of tchotchkes and old furniture from the garage to the driveway, setting up long tables and hanging largely gratuitous price tags on what was now virtually junk. (Ellen didn’t really want the money. She just wanted to get rid of her stuff.) I’m not sure exactly how this happened, but every other car was full of people Ellen knew. The most fun were her patients from the psych unit in the VA. Some showed up on motorcycles. Some in soft, handworked leather
vests and headbands. Some in rusted-out vans—cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, and with their latest sixty-five-year-old girlfriend riding shotgun. Ellen joked with them. “Elmer, I hope to God you took your meds before you got on that bike. I mean the meds we prescribed for you, not the ones you bought on the Internet.”

  Since I have been writing this book, Ellen and I have been talking off and on about dharma. She said to me one day, “I think my dharma is to create a safe space for people. To create a safe container in which people can thrive and be themselves. To be a kind of home base for folks—especially those who have no other home base.”

  Ellen and I have created an ongoing joke. I direct The Institute for Extraordinary Living at Kripalu. We decided that Ellen’s house—for many years a sanctuary for me, as for so many others—would henceforth be known as The Institute for Ordinary Living. It would be a place where I could feel both of my feet on the ground. It has been for me through the years a place where I can embrace the magic of ordinary living. Whereas my mind is often in the clouds, Ellen’s is right on the ground.

  And yet, in spite of all of this, deep into middle age, Ellen is still occasionally confounded by her early demons of grandiosity and devaluing. Ellen continues to wrestle with the process of naming and claiming her dharma. What is my life really about? Does my little dharma really matter? These doubts, when their tracks have been laid down early, become remarkably intractable. And they create suffering.

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  Each one of us has, at some point, been caught like Ellen between the twin perils of grandiosity and devaluing. On the one hand, we secretly daydream about being famous, being glamorous, being renowned for some great work. On the other hand, we fear that our small lives—such as they are—don’t amount to a hill of beans. So there they are: the devil—grandiosity. And the deep blue sea—devaluing. They are both unhappy ways to live.

  What is really the right size for our life—for our dharma? Not too big. Not too small.

  In New York, Thoreau was reaching too high. He had an idea of greatness. But it became a rigidly held concept that disconnected him from his true greatness, which was both smaller and larger than he thought. At Walden, however, Thoreau was right-sized. At Walden he undertook just a small experiment. He was near enough to home to get his daily delivery of cookies. He was comfortable enough, yes. But he was just a little uncomfortable, too. There was a stretch. Just enough of a stretch. And right in that balance, Thoreau found the correct size for his life. And his dharma exploded with energy.

  Right size is everything.

  Think of the small as large.

  FOUR

  Walt Whitman:

  Listen for the Call of the Times

  The Civil War “saved” Walt Whitman. He said so himself in the waning days of his long and eventful life. How precisely it was that the war saved Whitman is one of the most compelling—and largely unknown—stories of dharma in American history. And the telling of this story gives us the opportunity to look at the third—and in many ways the most complex—hallmark of dharma-discernment: the intersection of The Gift and the The Times.

  Most of us, of course, know Walt Whitman as a celebrated American poet, essayist, philosopher, and patriot. He lived from 1819 to 1892. His masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, has often been called the first great American epic poem. But his work was exceedingly controversial during his lifetime, and Leaves of Grass was widely viewed as obscene for its overt sexuality. Whitman himself was—like Thoreau—seen as a loafer, a failure, and a ne’er-do-well. And worse, in Whitman’s case, a “sexual invert.” “Guilty,” said one reviewer of Leaves of Grass, “of that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians.”

  What most of us don’t know is that Walt Whitman found what he believed was his truest calling, as a volunteer nurse during the Civil War. Between 1862 and the end of the war, he visited thousands of sick, wounded, lonely, and dying young men in the hospitals of the Union Army. He brought them fruit, candy, cigarettes, writing paper. But mostly he brought them himself. His tender spirit. His generous nature. His broken heart. And by the conclusion of the war, he understood that these suffering men and boys had called forth something within him more precious than even his gift for poetry.

  Whitman’s work in the hospitals used him up. It wore him out. It ruined his health, and initiated a slow slide toward death. But he never regretted it—or counted the cost. “I only gave myself,” he told a friend. “But I got the boys.”

  His story shows us why it is that we cannot look at The Gift only for its own sake. The Gift cannot reach maturity until it is used in the service of a greater good. In order to ignite the full ardency of dharma, The Gift must be put in the service of The Times.

  In the Bhagavad Gita, Arjuna finds his dharma calling him to the center of the greatest cataclysm of the age. It is no accident that the priestly authors of the Gita place their exemplar at the exact center of the suffering of the times. It is precisely Arjuna’s offering of himself to the urgent call of the moment that will turn his gifts into world-transforming dharma.

  If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. Yes. But this saving is not just for you. It is for the common good. If you bring forth what is within you, it will save the world. It will rescue the times. It will save the whole people. Likewise: If you do not bring forth what is within you it will destroy you. But not just you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy the whole people.

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  Walt Whitman began the Civil War in a deep depression. His career as a poet had burst into the national consciousness in 1855—just six years before the war ignited—with the publication of Leaves of Grass. Emerson immediately hailed Leaves as the “launch of a great career.”

  Its opening stanzas were strange, breathtaking.

  I celebrate myself, and sing myself

  And what I assume you shall assume,

  For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

  The poem startled readers with an earthy American voice, singing of “the teeming, energetic, inventive masses,” and of America’s spirit of resilience and nobility. Its pulse was loose, free, and frankly erotic.

  I loaf and invite my soul,

  I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

  My tongue, every atom of my blood, formed from this soil, this air,

  Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,

  I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,

  Hoping to cease not till death.

  Leaves of Grass was more than a book of poetry. It was a declaration of the possibilities of American democracy, and the spirit of the individual that democracy sustains. Whitman was a mystic, yes. But he was a new kind of mystic: a mystic of the people.

  The times in which Whitman wrote, however, were perilous, and the spirit of Whitman’s poetry soon stalled. In the years immediately after the publication of Leaves of Grass, the nation spiraled toward civil war, and Whitman himself—even after his initial triumph—was caught in a personal slough of despond. He spent his nights carousing and cruising with his fellow Bohemians in New York’s Greenwich Village, and drinking at the notorious Pfaff’s beer cellar. He frequented the New York Free Love league in his spare time. He hung out with (and probably slept with) tough young men from the docks and coach houses. All the while, he lived in an attic room in his mother’s home, which, though filled with affection, was also saturated with addiction and mental illness.

  During the day, Whitman was underemployed variously as a newspaperman and editor. And when not carousing with the handsome coach drivers on the streets of Manhattan, he obsessively edited and revised Leaves of Grass. Whitman was stuck. Stuck in his own past. And stuck in a vision of the country that he vastly preferred to the reality he saw around him. His dharma—so potent just a few years before—had dried up under his fe
et.

  3

  Dharma callings are more fluid than we would like them to be. These callings can change maddeningly. Just when we settle into a satisfying moment of dharma flowering, the world upends us. Just when we think we have gotten our due reward in a stretch of good dharma road, the car skids off into a ditch.

  Katherine, our friend the girls’ school dean—not at all unlike Whitman—found herself suddenly shipwrecked after a long stretch of smooth sailing. A once-electrifying vocation had become unaccountably stale, used up, finished. She discovered, like Whitman, that brilliant careers can turn into golden handcuffs. Used up as they may be, they’re still hard to leave behind.

  Katherine, you will remember, was indeed handcuffed to a worn-out calling. “It’s all I can do to drag myself out of the bed in the morning,” she told me. “How did this happen? I pictured myself in this job till they carried me out—growing old as the wise elder of the school.”

  The tortured clinging to an earlier expression of The Gift very often precedes the emergence of some new version. We’re aware of the dryness at the center, yes, but this aridity is usually not quite enough to propel us forward. We must first get just a whiff of the new. The surprising and intoxicating whiff of a new dharma is quite irresistible.

  Katherine, alas, had not yet sniffed out the new. Walt Whitman was about to.

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  Walt Whitman’s whiff of his new dharma was characteristically dramatic.

  The American Civil War ignited in 1861 with the firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The North was galvanized into action by this event. Soon afterward, Whitman’s brother George enthusiastically enlisted in the rapidly gathering Union Army. Whitman and his family were now intimately involved in the young war—through George—and they anxiously scanned the newspaper accounts of battles, paying worried attention to the lists of wounded and dead. In mid-December of 1862, their worst fears were realized. The New-York Tribune carried a list of casualties at the bloody battle of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and there appeared on the list one “G. W. Whitmore, Company D.”