Free The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling by Stephen Cope

do I have to say? Digging down into his own inner world, and longing for his roots in the woods of Concord, Thoreau—from his tenement in New York—wrote the brilliant sketch on “the first sparrow of spring,” which would become one of the most famous passages in
Walden
. (As it turns out, an overwhelming amount of great nature writing has been written in the city by writers who long for their true homes.)
    Finally, the unhappy writer—floundering, separated from himself—had to go home, tail between his legs. He returned to Concord—to his woods, to his pond, to his father’s pencil factory, and to Emerson’s house. “Be humbly who you are,” he wrote upon arriving home.
    Thoreau’s failure in New York was a life lesson.
Be who you are. Do what you love. Follow your own distant drummer
. “A man’s own calling ought not to be forsaken!”
    Failure is a part of all great dharma stories. And great dharma failures do not just happen early in life. They routinely happen throughout life. We only know who we are by trying on various versions of ourselves. We try various dharmas on to see if they fit. How do I look in this? Yes, this looks cool, and feels great. Or: egad, no! Not in a million years. When the clothes don’t fit well, it clarifies things for us. In any quest for dharma there will inevitably be lots of trying on of outfits.
    Thoreau’s failure is particularly instructive, because it emerged from a dharma error most of us have made at one point or another in our lives: the attempt to be
big
. The attempt to be, in fact, bigger than we
are
. A confusion about the right size of a life of dharma.
    3
    Remember Ellen—my friend the psychiatric nurse?
    Ellen, as you recall, was in a muddle about her calling. Any of her friends could see that she had been acting from the center of her dharma for years. Even complete strangers could see it. But she saw it only fleetingly. She had never fully named her dharma, accepted it, embraced it.As a result, she had gone through too many years feeling that she had somehow not entirely won at the game of life.
    Much of Ellen’s muddle was in her
thinking about her dharma
. She thought that her job, her calling, was
too small
. It didn’t match up to her fantasies of what a calling
should be
.
    Some of her thinking, no doubt, was inspired by the views of our culture about nursing. Caretaking roles are not highly regarded by our society, to say the least. The nobility of the helping professions is all too invisible. Nurses are taken for granted—and doctors are too often esteemed not because they are wonderful caretakers but because they are good businesspeople. (Ellen, by the way, has no problem with her self-esteem in the face of doctors. For thirty years she has presided—day in and day out—over an enormously complex psych unit through which doctors merely cruised from time to time.)
    But Ellen’s problems started long before her nursing career. I had known Ellen’s parents—both now long dead—and I knew how some of their ideas had inevitably found their way into Ellen’s head. Ellen’s father, Bud, was caught between the twin agonies of grandiosity and devaluing. He was a bright, entrepreneurial man, who had tried to create a business selling frozen cookies long before frozen foods were a staple of American life. His ideas were innovative and really quite brilliant, but a hairsbreadth before their time. He would have made a fortune had he tried them out a few years later. Bud’s business venture failed, and he remained caught for the rest of his career directing a school lunch program, which seemed to him a real betrayal of his potential.
    By the time I knew him, Bud felt defeated. He was cynical about work, and obsessed with security, safety, and keeping expectations low. Shortly after I graduated from college he suggested that I might consider driving a truck for a living, because it was a safe and steady income. “You’ll never go hungry,” he said.