The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (5 page)

Fear of Closing the Door is one version of dharma paralysis. But there are many others—countless others, really. Let me recount just a couple of these to you, so that you can get a flavor of the possibilities.

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Katherine’s story is rather dramatic. But here is a different kind of dharma problem that is perhaps closer to home for most of us. Let’s call this one Denial of Dharma.

My friend Ellen and I were talking one day over brunch. I was telling her about the work of our Institute, and asking her about her own life—her own vocation. “Well, I don’t really have a calling,” said Ellen a little wistfully. “I wish I did. But I don’t.” Ellen was at that time a head nurse in the psychiatric unit of a local VA hospital. I knew—because several of her colleagues had told me—that she was greatly respected, and even loved, in the hospital. She was knowledgeable, professional, masterful. Always learning more. A hard worker. As she described herself, though, she was “just a regular old worker bee—not one of those people with a high calling.”

Ellen loves to help. To support people. To love people. To be of service. Not only at work, but all around her community in Albany. She helps Jessica, our mutual friend with Alzheimer’s. She takes care of Bill,
her friend with a brain tumor. She keeps a watchful eye out for her adult son, Jim, and his girlfriend—helping where she can, and unobtrusively. I mean, really. Ellen is an angel for many. Her Thanksgiving table, a meal which I attend every year, is an outpouring of generosity. Ellen gets a tremendous amount of satisfaction out of lending a hand. She does it quietly, with no fanfare, and often with great humor. Her best friend, Dee, told me recently that in the early years of their friendship, she watched Ellen very closely, looking for the crack in her spirit of giving. She can’t really be
that
generous, can she? She can’t really enjoy giving that much. She must secretly resent it, don’t you think? Finally, Dee concluded with astonishment that she actually
does
enjoy giving that much.

Now, Ellen has a brother named Henry, who is also a good friend of mine. Henry is a well-known film producer. He lives a crazily dramatic life. He is wildly and publicly successful. He is rich. He is Ellen’s younger brother. But Ellen has always felt overshadowed by him. Who wouldn’t?

Ellen lives with the sense that she does not have a calling, simply because her calling is not dramatic—like Henry’s. But she most certainly
does
have a calling. It’s clear to everyone around her. Her dharma work is everywhere. It saturates her life. She lives so much in the center of her calling that she doesn’t see it. For Ellen, her
life
is her dharma. It is not just about her job, or even her career, though in her case, that career, too, is part of her dharma. Ellen is squarely in the middle of her dharma. But she has not named it, and therefore is not, in a strange sense,
doing it on purpose
. All that is left is for her to embrace her dharma. To name it. To claim it. To own it.

This is Denial of Dharma, and I see it all the time. It is a sly version of doubt. With Denial of Dharma, there is often a vagueness, a lack of clarity—and confusion about the nature of dharma itself. Ellen’s boat is not really sailing trimmed to the wind. But it could be. If she just took a small step toward embracing her dharma. What stands in her way? We will examine this interesting question in some depth as we go along.

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And finally, here is one last example of the many forms of doubt. This one we will call The Problem of Aim.

Let me introduce you to a man I will call Brian—Father Brian—who is a priest in a local Roman Catholic parish. Brian was young—as most are—when he went to seminary in Boston and committed to the priesthood. He knew he had a vocation. He felt it stirring early in his high school days, when he admired the priests at the prestigious private high school he attended. And he had always loved to be in church. The Church, as he once told me, always “had the magic” for him.

So what is the problem? Well, Brian is now forty-three years old, and he knows more about who he really is. He now says he was perhaps slightly confused about his vocation. Yes, he does love the Church, and he does believe in the Church as an important institution. But he realizes now that what he really loves, what really gets him up in the morning, is the
music
of the Church. He’s an accomplished organist. Has a beautiful Irish tenor voice. He realizes now, as he leads Sunday Mass, that he would much rather be in the choir, or directing the choir, or playing the organ, than be behind the altar. “I just don’t feel like a priest,” he says. “I feel like a musician. I feel like a transgendered person before the operation. I look like a priest. But under the cassock, it’s not quite me.” He looks down from the throne where he sits as rector, and longs to be just a part of the choir.

Oops. Brian almost made it squarely to the center of his vocation. But not quite. Close—but no cigar. Brian lives in close proximity to his dharma—to his passion. But not in the passionate center of it. It has taken him quite a few years to realize this.

This is not a simple problem. In fact, Brian is actually very good at being a priest. He is a wonderful preacher—an incisive theological thinker. And though it’s true that he’s not gifted as a counselor, and that in obvious ways he is not interested in being a pastor, he has so many of the gifts one needs that he “passes” very well as a competent rector.

This is a problem of aim. How important is it that we live squarely in the center of our dharma? How many of us get it almost right, but not quite right? And is a miss by an inch
really
as good as a miss by a mile?

Brian has done pretty well with his dilemma, at least until recently. It seems that the older he gets, the more he longs to live squarely in the center of his dharma, and the more he feels the accumulated weight of a kind of creeping self-betrayal. In the past two years, he tells me, he has
begun to feel moments of desperation about it. He is angry with God. He has periods of loss of faith. He gets depressed. And he is currently seeing a Church counselor. It is all pouring out.

Brian has finally realized that he does have the gift of a passion,
but he has not been pursuing it
. He has been trying to transcend this conflict through prayer and confession, and through being as close as possible to what he loves: sacred music. This has been, for him, like falling in love with someone who is married to someone else, and deciding that it might be enough in this lifetime just to live
next door
to the beloved.

Do you recognize Brian’s problem of aim? It’s a curious thing about dharma. It’s almost all about aim. It appears that we will not hit the target of dharma unless we are
aiming
at it. And does hitting the target matter? It does to Brian. He is on the floor of his chariot as we speak.

Katherine, Ellen, Brian. Each one of them is stuck on the bottom of their chariots. Unable to fully assent. Lacking certitude. Their lives are colored by doubt.

There are, of course, a thousand ways of being stuck. Of being split. Freud believed that that “split” is the very nature of neurosis. And that none of us can avoid it. It is, apparently, a part of the human experience.

But is a life of certitude really possible? Krishna teaches that it is. But the key to living a life true to dharma is a complete understanding of and respect for doubt. Indeed, the only way to get to certitude is to look more and more deeply into our doubt—to shine a light into the dark corners of our self-division.

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Let’s revisit our friends Krishna and Arjuna. Arjuna, you will recall, is still sitting on the floor of his brightly painted chariot, his knees tucked up tight to his chest, and his arms wrapped around his legs. His head is slumped forward. Krisha stands next to him—silently—and Arjuna can feel Krishna’s powerful gaze. The flags on the back of the chariot flap softly in the wind. The field of Kurukshetra—the field of battle—seems preternaturally quiet.

At the outset of our tale, Krishna has given Arjuna a sublime speech about our True Nature. But Arjuna is not in the mood for philosophy.
He has more pressing problems on his mind. He is still stuck—facing a devastating battle, and perhaps his own death. He is struggling with a seemingly impossible decision about all of it. He lives in a world of immediate difficult choices.