The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (7 page)

When Randy was fourteen, he built his own go-cart out of scraps that were just hanging around the garage, and a discarded engine he bought at a junkyard. Randy worked on his exotic contraption intently—seriously—for hours at a time, and then roared off in a cloud of dust down the long gravel road behind our house in small-town Ohio. Jeesh. Where did this love of machines come from? Neither of my parents knew which end of a spark plug was up. Nor did any of our extended family. All clueless. Was he adopted?

Randy also had a hydroplane, an awkward homemade affair that he—with measured tinkering—made go faster than any other boat on the lake where we spent our summers. And when my uncle bought an old European sports car, Randy knew how to drive it without prior instruction. He would glide smoothly through the gears with the precision of a test pilot. Huh? How on earth did he know how to do that? Sitting confidently at the steering wheel, he would turn to me with passion in his eyes: “Wanna drive it?” I looked back blankly.

With the perspective of adulthood, I have at last found words to describe what had been happening: Randy had a gift. A freely given, mysterious aptitude for the world of the machine.

Well, I had gifts, too, and Randy, I learned later, was just as puzzled by
my
gifts as I was by his. Apparently he was especially awed by my gift for music. Even at six, I was able to sit down at my grandfather’s old upright piano and pick out a tune. Later, with no training at all, I began to add harmonies, and eventually could spin out most any song I heard, playing, as my parents called it, “by ear.” In all honesty, I myself sometimes marveled at this.

Gifts. Each of us has them. There is no point trying to account for them. Their source is as much a mystery as anything else in life. Nonetheless they’re real—and remarkably easy to identify, even from a young age. If asked, any of us could easily name the gifts of most anyone we’re close to.

Strangely, as kids, no one helped either Randy or me to understand the nature of our gifts. They were commented upon, of course. Some small attention was paid. I was given piano lessons (in a manner of speaking) with old Mrs. Croft across the street. Randy got a lame box of tools (“a boy’s first tool kit”) for Christmas. But no one ever suggested how important our gifts really were. No one suggested that I might want to be a pianist. Or my brother a race-car driver. My parents, and the rest of the world, seemed to have other plans for us—plans that had little to do with our idiosyncratic fascinations. We assumed that that was the way life was. No one suggested that a go-cart or an old baby grand piano were for us among the few authentic doorways into the possibility of a fulfilling and useful life. Or into the very nature of life itself. Or into our connection with God.

This may be one reason I today find the Bhagavad Gita so compelling. Here is an ancient treatise whose primary intent is to make an explicit connection between gifts and fulfillment. Between the go-cart and God.

Said Krisha to Arjuna, “It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of someone else.”

Better to fail at your own dharma? Better to fail at the pursuit of one’s own puny inner genius than to succeed in any other, however exalted?
Better to find your own inner fingerprint, no matter what the outcome? Really that important?

Krishna teaches Arjuna that our gifts are
sva dharma
—literally, “one’s
own
dharma.” Yoga sages later went on to teach that
sva dharma
, your own dharma, is equivalent to
sva bhava
, your
own being
. These gifts are somehow close to the very center of who we are.

As kids, Randy and I
almost
knew this. The go-cart and the piano were doorways into our own true natures. Full of infinite potential. They were possibility itself.

I say
almost
knew it, because we only knew it energetically—in the secret and ineffable places kids know these things. But this energetic knowing, this connection to the aliveness of the gift, is a very tender plant, as fragile as any unrooted sprout.

Don’t get me wrong: The Gift itself is indestructible. “Fire cannot burn it,” Krishna teaches. But the connection to the gift? The trust in the gift? The faith in the gift? This trust is, at least early on, exquisitely fragile. It is vulnerable to all manner of disruption. And here, very early, is precisely where doubt enters in. Doubt: The paralyzing affliction.

Randy and I were typical kids growing up in America in the fifties and sixties. We were sons of an ordinary middle-class family. There was very little money—but there was lots of education. And yet there was precious little faith in, or acknowledgment of, these mysteries. So our trust in The Gift was not nurtured. Indeed, at times it was run roughshod over—unknowingly.

Like most everyone else in our culture, Randy’s life, and my own, would then become one long pilgrimage to regain any thin wisp of trust—to reclaim our trust in The Gift and even to turn this wily filament into a small oak of faith. We would search for a way to reestablish
faith in the way things are
.

Randy did not become a race-car driver. And I did not become a concert pianist. Would we have been happier, more fulfilled, if we had? Who knows. There are no easy formulas for these things. It’s important to remember that The Gift is not itself dharma. It is only, as the old saying goes, a finger pointing to the dharma.

On the other hand, Randy does work for a large trucking company—still living close to the almighty engine (though he works as a manager
in the human resources department). And I’ve schlepped a piano around with me from house to house my entire adult life. I still play Beethoven and Bach and Cole Porter songs in the evening, and sometimes when no one is home I accompany myself as I sing Puccini arias (very badly) to myself.

I’ve had moments when I felt that I was living perfectly aligned with my dharma. When the spine of life has seemed absolutely aligned. Nonetheless, I still wonder about this at times. What would my life have looked like today if my musical gift had been named, valued, nurtured, prized—really seen for what it was? In my work with young musicians at Kripalu, I have occasionally sat down at the piano to accompany a singer, or play some chamber music with a group of students. After one of these sessions—when a group of us was playing the achingly beautiful songs of Richard Strauss—one of the young violinists turned to me and said, with obvious surprise, “That was really impressive.” I almost hate to admit it to myself, but that declaration—and that evening—remains a high point. Was it because I stepped for a moment back onto the road not taken?

Are there roads not taken that occasionally light you up? Do you ever fantasize about what might have been had it all gone differently?

Let’s look at the question from another perspective: Do you know anyone whose gifts
were
seen, mirrored, prized? Who took the obvious road early? And thrived?

It does happen. There are people all around us who have been the recipient of this grace.

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Dame Jane Goodall is a svelte, girlish-looking woman with beautiful eyes, a soft smile, and a quietly aristocratic bearing. She is one of the world’s leading primatologists. Motivated by her love of animals (recognized, I hasten to say, when she was practically still a baby), Goodall spent decades observing the behavior of chimpanzees in Tanzania. Her remarkable fifty-year trek in the jungles of East Africa transformed our view of the primate world.

I have been fascinated by this woman for years. When I first heard
her speak, I couldn’t get over the fact that this sweet, velvet woman challenged the entire scientific establishment and won. (I thought of the teaching from the
Tao te Ching:
“
The gentlest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world.”) Goodall did not play by the rules: She
named
her chimps, for goodness’ sake—the subjects of her study. She fell in love with them. And as a result, she was probably the first human being to be admitted into a roaming, in-the-jungle chimp society.

Goodall was the first scientist to document chimpanzees making tools. Not just
using
tools, but actually
making
tools. Until this discovery, tool making had been seen as
the
quintessentially human behavior:
man the toolmaker
. Goodall changed all that. She also documented chimpanzees’ exhibition of what we think of as the exclusively human traits of altruism and compassion. As it turns out, chimps appear to love and care for one another. Her observations revolutionized our view of the animal world, and challenged the scientific community to reconsider well-accepted definitions of “being human.” Did you know that chimpanzees’ DNA differs from human DNA by a mere one percent? This has been hard for some people to accept.

Goodall’s gifts have proliferated into a bonfire of contributions to the world, and have earned her many honors. She was named Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace in 2004. In recent years, Goodall has become one of the world’s leading conservationists, and a champion for many aspects of the endangered natural world, particularly rain forests, primates, and other animal species. Her life, as she herself describes it in her autobiography,
Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey
, is one of fulfillment—an exuberant connection with the natural world, and with God. Not a perfect life: She has had her share of tragedy. Her first marriage—to the elegant Baron Hugo van Lawick—was unhappy and ended in divorce. Her second ended with the tragic death of her much-loved husband, Derek Bryceson. But still, she has (if anyone has) lived an impassioned human existence.

What is most interesting for our story is the way in which Goodall
got
to this passionate life. How did she develop from a little girl born into an aristocratic family in the heart of London to a fearless champion
of the wildness of Africa? How did the little girl—who at age eighteen months collected worms in the city and took them to bed with her—become a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire?

The answers to these question are, of course, complex. But there is one dramatic fact of Goodall’s early life that we must examine in depth here: As a child, her gifts were
named, celebrated, cherished, and nurtured
.

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