The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (9 page)

After a year or so in the jungles of Tanzania, Jane began to make thrilling contact with her chimpanzees. In
Reason for Hope
, she describes an extraordinary meeting of minds between chimpanzee and scientist—a meeting for which her henhouse experience had prepared her—and a meeting that would change her view of the possibilities of her work. Here she describes an early moment with David Greybeard, a gray-chinned male chimp who became her first real “friend” in the troop:

To this day I remember the soft pressure of his fingers.”

As Jane made more frequent connections with the objects of her fascination, she describes an increasing sense of
knowing her dharma
. “
More and more often,” she says, “I found myself thinking, ‘This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.’ ”

In her sixties and seventies, Jane became a world traveler and lecturer, urging human beings everywhere to widen their circle of compassion to include the animal world.

She describes the maturation of her sense of dharma. “
Each one of us matters, has a role to play, and makes a difference,” she says. She describes hearing a “still small voice” that guides her, and that she believes to be the “Voice of God.” She says, “
Of course, it is usually called the voice of conscience, and if we feel more comfortable with that definition, that’s fine. Whatever we call it, the important thing, I think, is to try to do what the voice tells us.”

And then Jane sounds a note that is a theme throughout this book. As her connection to her dharma matures, she increasingly has a sense that she is not the doer of her actions, but that God is working through her. “
I always have this feeling—which may not be true at all—that I am being used as a messenger. There are times before a lecture when I have been absolutely exhausted, or actually sick, and terrified that I am going to utterly fail the audience. And those lectures are often among the best. Because, I think, I have been able to tap into the spiritual power that is always there, providing strength and courage if only we reach out.”

6

Henry David Thoreau said, “
The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

For Brian, at midlife, even building a woodshed would have been a stretch. By the time he was forty-five, he was depressed. Being a priest
required a heroic effort for him: mammoth amounts of self-will; a good deal of posing; and always having to bear the palpable absence of true mastery. True mastery, authentic dharma, is not possible without the kernel of The Gift at the center.

Psychologists call this inner and outer poseur the “false self.” The name says it all. The false self is a collection of ideas we have in our minds about who we
should
be. Sometimes these ideas—most often planted in childhood—can be so strong that they override our capacity to see who we actually are, or at least to fully embrace it. They become a kind of learning disability. Our capacity to see the world clearly is thwarted.

Brian is an exemplar of the quiet suffering of the false self: There develops a stilted relationship to work: mediocrity, lack of interest, lack of enthusiasm, lack of soul-connection to work. This eventually begins to invade even the sphere of play, for as Thoreau said, famously, “
Play comes after work.”

But there is something resilient about gifts: Their light is never fully extinguished. Our gifts are so close to the core of our being that they can never really be entirely destroyed, no matter how deadening the life. My brother still has two motorcycles that he rides in his spare time, a truck, and a BMW. He did not become a race-car driver, but he does go to Germany in the summer to a motorcycle-riding school in the Alps. Shining eyes, still.

Brian discovered deep in midlife that his gift of music was still calling out to him from someplace deep inside. Along with it there was a growing ache. And a growing unwillingness to live out the rest of his days without going for it. The older he got, the less able he was to maintain the ruse of the false self. As we get deeper into life, we become more aware of life’s finitude. We discover the truth taught by Krishna: You cannot be anyone you want to be. Your one and only shot at a fulfilled life is being yourself—whoever that is.

Furthermore, at a certain age it finally dawns on us that, shockingly, no one really
cares
what we’re doing with our life. This is a most unsettling discovery to those of us who have lived someone else’s dream and eschewed our own:
No one really cares except us
. When you scratch the
surface, you finally discover that it doesn’t really matter a whit who else you disappoint if you’re disappointing yourself. The only question that makes sense to ask is: Is your life working for you?

For Brian, at forty-five and deep into another career, the first step was to develop a process through which he could face the truth. He was so unhappy with his life as a priest that he had been on antidepressants for almost five years. Finally, out of desperation, he got into psychotherapy. There, he allowed himself to face his suffering—and finally, to name The Gift.

With the naming came a flood of regret. It was not the tidal wave of hope and relief he had counted on. Learning to embrace The Gift at midlife is complicated. Because naming The Gift and celebrating it also mean grieving for lost opportunities. They mean facing squarely the suffering of self-betrayal.

The deeper we get into life, the more difficult it can be to make the commitment to The Gift. Other commitments have to be relinquished. Space has to be made. Not only that, but Brian was terrified that, having carved out space, he might fail at his expression of The Gift. And indeed, there are no guarantees. Perhaps he would be a truly lousy—or even unhappy—church musician. Was he willing to take the risk? Willing to jettison all he had worked for?

There is no way around it: Dharma always involves, at some point, a leap off a cliff in the dark. Jane Goodall made her leaps early in life—and with a good deal of support. Still, there were leaps. Still, there was plenty of dark. What is most inspiring about Goodall’s life is the way in which she developed
a faith in the leap itself
.

Did Brian leap? Or stay rooted to the edge of the cliff? We will follow his progress later on in our story.

THREE

“
Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” wrote Henry David Thoreau. “Be humbly what you aspire to be … man’s noblest gift to man is his sincerity, for it embraces his integrity also.”

There is no greater champion of dharma in American letters than Henry David Thoreau, and he is one of the few who actually used the word “dharma” in his writing and in his thought. Thoreau was an American poet, naturalist, surveyor, philosopher, and a leading Transcendentalist. He is best known for his masterpiece,
Walden
, and for his essay
Civil Disobedience
. These, and his many other works, have inspired some of the world’s greatest exemplars of freedom—giants like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Nelson Mandela.

As it turns out, America’s greatest natural philosopher was also a student of the Bhagavad Gita. He studied it—along with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson—and often quoted from the majestic 1785 translation by Charles Wilkins. The Gita was one of the books Thoreau most prized during his two-and-a-half-year adventure at Walden Pond. Sitting at the side of Walden watching a sunrise, he would at times imagine himself as a yogi from ancient times absorbed in contemplation. “
Depend upon it,” he wrote in a letter to his friend H.G.O. Blake, “that rude and careless as I am, I would fain practice the yoga faithfully.”

Like every good yogi, Thoreau saw his entire life as a kind of trek toward dharma. “
A man tracks himself through life,” he wrote. “One
should be always on the trail of one’s own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.” He often quotes the Gita to himself in his personal journals, especially Krishna’s counsel about dharma: “
A man’s own calling,” he lets Krishna remind him, “with all its faults, ought not to be forsaken.”

Unlike Jane Goodall, young Thoreau was not a celebrity in his own day. Far from it. He was widely seen as “
an irresponsible idler, a trial to his family, and no credit to his town” (to quote one of his grumpy Concord neighbors). In short, Thoreau was seen as a loser.

I fell in love with Thoreau in graduate school. I loved how this guy had apparently embraced his inner loser. I had secretly felt like something of a loser myself, especially during the tormented social maneuvering of high school. But I had no idea there would be power in
embracing
this position on the social chessboard. I thought this side of me was to be hidden at all costs. So I tried all the harder to be seen as one of the elect: the winners.

Thoreau, known today as one of America’s greatest writers, was widely disregarded, overlooked, and scoffed at in his own time. His first book,
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
, never sold even the small, thousand-copy print run of its first edition.
Walden
, his masterpiece—now read by virtually every college sophomore—languished on bookstore shelves for years. Indeed, the first edition of 2,000 copies took eight years to sell, and there wasn’t a second printing until just before Thoreau’s untimely death in 1862.

Thoreau’s resolutely unconventional life as the mystic of Concord required a different kind of courage than did Goodall’s. It required the courage to acknowledge The Gift in the face of widespread disapprobation. It required the resilience to breathe air in the same town in which he was seen as a kind of community joke. And it required Thoreau to develop a fierce sense of autonomy. As a result of his steadfast loyalty to his gifts, of course, the world came to respect them as well. And that same scoffing world has now been applauding his genius—and his gritty aphorisms—for over a hundred and fifty years.