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

He had himself tasted hunger: While Bud was perfecting the frozen cookie, his family had endured several bleak winters in a house they came to call “Hungry Hill.”
    Ellen—through Bud—had come smack up against two of the enemies of dharma: grandiosity, and its flip side, devaluing. (In short, the problem of size.) Grandiosity and devaluing both represent unrealistic thinking about possibility. Grandiosity motivates us to try to be biggerthan we could possibly be. Devaluing makes us think of ourselves as smaller than we actually are.
    Ellen’s father often told her that his harsh discipline was “for her own good,” and that it was part of a grand (his own term for it) strategy to help her make of her life “a great work of art.” His precise words were devastating, and I wince when Ellen reminds me of them: “You are a piece of granite,” he said to her, time and again. “I am the sculptor. And I will
grind you fine
.” This was said with sadistic emphasis. “And if,” he continued, working himself up into a lather, “if perchance my mallet slips and the whole thing crumbles to dust, well,
I will take that chance
.”
    This young woman didn’t have a prayer. Nursing—for which she was in every single way suited—did not in her eyes really qualify her life as “a work of art.” So Ellen remained split—as her father was—between big ideas and what seemed to be an unacceptably smaller reality. For obvious reasons, Ellen could not always embrace who
she actually was
. So she lived with doubt—sometimes unsure about what otherwise could have been embraced as an immensely satisfying career.
    The question of the “size” of a life is tricky territory, because big ideas also have an expansive quality to them that allow us to experiment with who we
can
be. Big ideas are not bad. But somehow, the bigness must remain closer to the ground than it did for Ellen’s father. The bigness, must, in fact, come
through the smallness
. Thoreau discovered this on his trek to New York.
    “Be resolutely and faithfully what you are,” said Thoreau—not who you think you should be. Thoreau’s early struggle was to be “right-sized.” Not too big, not too small. It was his resolute embrace of a right-sized self that became for him the doorway into a full life.
    Having landed back on both feet at Walden Pond, Thoreau said, “I would rather walk to Rutland [Vermont] than to Jerusalem.” This was written at a time when there was much grand gesturing about the metaphysical Jerusalem. No grand gesture for Thoreau. No Jerusalem. Gritty (and nearby) Vermont would do.
    “Think of the small as large,” wrote Lao Tzu, the author of the
Tao te Ching
. Thoreau is the great American genius of this aphorism.
Think of the small as large
. “See yourself as a grain of sand,” suggests ChögyamTrungpa, the Tibetan crazy-wisdom guru, “see yourself as the smallest of the small. Then you can make room for the whole world.”
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    By May of 1845, Thoreau was home from New York City and back in the woods at Walden Pond—building his cabin. His feet were solidly planted back on
terra firma
. He was engaged in dharma that was right-sized. Thoreau now saw clearly that the journey of a writer was not the outer journey to New York, but the inner journey to his own voice. He was going to be himself, and to hell with the naysayers. He would live out the Transcendentalist view that “human nature in general is revealed to each person through his own nature in particular.”
His own nature in particular
. Walden Pond was where Henry David Thoreau would intentionally conduct this inner journey to himself.
    At this crossroads in his life something fascinating happens to Thoreau: His powers as a writer explode. Two days after moving to Walden Pond, he wrote a lengthy entry in his journal about his personal experience of “self-emancipation.” He was exploring the idea of an exhilarating personal freedom in a passage in which he had been