The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (12 page)

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

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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