The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (23 page)

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As she grew fully into her dharma, Susan saw that a great work can only be accomplished through a series of small acts. She called these small acts “subsoil plowing”—a wonderfully agricultural image from the daughter of a farmer. Later in life, Susan set about a campaign of education.
She would lecture, raise consciousness among women, give them tools to speak, to organize. She would henceforward get women engaged through a kind of saturation-bombing approach. She moved tirelessly from town to town and city to city, preparing the ground for those whom she knew would come after her.

Once she found her dharma, it became the point of radiance around which all of her energies were organized. How she lived, ate, dressed, spoke, moved, thought, all began to move into orbit around
the work
. Her life itself took on the radiance and color of her central vision. This gave her life enormous power. But she understood that it was not
her
power. It was the power of the dharma.

Susan felt her own life’s energy begin to connect with the bigger stream of social concern and suffering. “I believe our happiness is increased by yielding momentary self-gratification and doing all in our power to render others happy.” In its most mature form, dharma inevitably puts the energies of self in the service of others—in the service of something bigger than self.

Susan’s later life is exemplary of a central fact of dharma: It always involves the surrender of self to Self. In this surrender, action and awareness merge, time disappears, and the work is no longer “my” work, but “the work.” The work becomes the path to God—the way of knowing the Divine essence.

Susan never denied the existence of God. But her beliefs were secularized and lodged in the world around her. When she was once asked, “
Do you pray?” she responded, “I pray every single second of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.”

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Just three years before she died, Susan B. Anthony was attending—as she had for the previous forty years—the annual suffrage convention that was then being held in New Orleans. She was now eighty-three, and the honorary president of the organization. As she entered the hall, a thunderous ovation spontaneously erupted, and went on for many minutes.

Alarmed, Susan turned to her longtime lieutenant, Anna B. Shaw, and asked, “What has happened?”

Shaw replied, “You happened, Aunt Susan.”

Anthony still looked puzzled.

“It’s for you,” explained Shaw to a dumbstruck Anthony. “The applause is for you.”

“Nonsense,” she shot back. “It’s not for me. It’s for the cause—The Cause.”

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“
When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form.”

Perhaps the most demanding practice in a life of dharma is the ongoing practice of unification—a process that Susan B. Anthony had mastered. Unification means simply that everything in your life must line up around the spine of your dharma. Eventually, everything that is
not
dharma must fall away—as it did in the life of Susan B. Anthony. Any life of dharma will demonstrate this principle.

Writing has been my own particular school for dharma, and it has taught me a lot about the challenges—and power—of the Bhagavad Gita’s Doctrine of Unified Action. After all, when you look closely, you’ll discover that writing a book is nothing more than a heroic act of unification. How does this work? Well, the book has a spine. A dharma. But you don’t know what its dharma is until you begin to write it. Forget about all the things you said to yourself about your book at the beginning of the project—or what you told your editor, or what you wrote in your brilliant book proposal. No. The book has its own dharma, which will slowly reveal itself to you. And then you have a choice. You can choose the book’s dharma. Or you can choose your
idea
of what the book should be. If you choose the latter, of course, the book will be a lousy book. It will have no power. If you choose the former—your book’s authentic dharma—well, then you are really in deep trouble. Because you will have to bring absolutely everything you’ve got to the effort to manifest this book’s true calling.

You’ll hear the faint call of the book’s dharma at first. And then you
will have to practice listening very, very hard, day in and day out. You’ll go down roads that you think are the dharma, and find them to be dead ends. You’ll have to retrace your steps. You’ll write wonderful chapters full of what you imagine to be wisdom and elegant sentences. And then you’ll discover that they do not align with the book’s dharma at all, and you will have to throw them on the floor of your writing room. You’ll have to be relentless. Because the book will not fulfill its calling unless everything is lined up along the spine of the book’s calling. Everything extra must go.

A life of dharma is exactly like a great yoga posture. Everything must be aligned around the spine. The dharma is a strict taskmaster. It will require you to
reach
—to work at your maximum potential. In order to do this, you will have to learn to take better care of yourself. You will have to sleep and eat properly. (In the case of a writer, you will have to stop abusing your mind with poorly written books.) You will probably have to create a regular schedule. And one day you’ll realize you’re in training like an Olympic athlete. But not any old training—a particular
kind
of training, the particular kind of training that will support
your
dharma and no one else’s. The dharma itself will prescribe this training, and you will know it when you stumble onto it through trial and error. You’ll know it by its results, because in moments when you’re in proper training, you will feel yourself a channel for this book. You will have stepped aside somehow and let the book come through you. And this is an experience so far beyond any pleasure you’ve ever had that you will most definitely want more of it. And so you will henceforth be increasingly careful about your training regimen. You will give up that big bowl of ice cream before bed, because you know it’ll leave you groggy in the morning. You want to be clear. For the book.

For brief moments during the writing, you will actually surrender to the book. In these moments of surrender, there is only the book. There is no you. There is no telling when these moments will arise. They may emerge on the worst morning of your writing career—after your girlfriend leaves you and the neighbor rear-ends your car. You know that if you don’t go into training and suit up and show up every morning at your writing desk, these wonderful moments will in fact
never
happen.
So you train as religiously as you can. Now you are hooked by dharma—by the magic of inaction in action.

You realize partway through (as Susan B. Anthony did in her life of dharma) that half measures will not work. You realize that a 70 percent investment of energy does not bring about a 70 percent book. It brings about a mediocre book. And then, really, what is the point? Does the world really need another half-assed book? So you see that you have to bring yourself 100 percent to the task.

Unification is the very soul of dharma. We see it in every life we’ve studied during this entire project. Thoreau streamlined his life in order to free his inner mystic. Frost became a farmer who farmed poetry. Goodall organized her life around her chimps. The degree of unification that you accomplish is the degree to which you’re doing your dharma. “How we spend our days,” says author Annie Dillard, “is, of course, how we
spend our lives.”

Once the mature Susan B. Anthony had fully organized her life around her dharma, she declared, as I have said, “Failure is impossible.” She had grasped the central principle: As long as you are living your dharma fully—unified!—you cannot fail. Indeed, you have already succeeded.

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