The Great Work of Your Life: A Guide for the Journey to Your True Calling (10 page)

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Thoreau did come to value The Gift. But he made one largely unknown and yet fascinating stab at “fitting in” early on in his life—one attempt to be who he thought he
should
be rather than who he
was
. I find it strangely reassuring to examine this anomalous chapter in his life.

In May of 1843, at the age of twenty-six, Henry David Thoreau set off for New York City. He was intent on securing his place in the city’s sparkling literary scene. Thoreau had already begun to find his footing as a writer. He’d discovered that he was not, as he had thought, a poet, but a prose artist. By the time he left for New York, his prose had already matured beyond the influence of his highly respected teacher, Ralph Waldo Emerson. (Thoreau was aware that Emerson was not happy with his prose, and to his way of thinking, this proved only that he was indeed moving in the right direction—toward himself.) By May of 1843, just several years out of Harvard and with only a slim body of work under his belt, Thoreau nonetheless judged himself ready to mingle with the great and near-great of the American world of letters—Horace Greeley, Henry James Sr., W. H. Channing.

Thoreau was a colossal failure in the city. But the story of this failure, and of Thoreau’s thirteen months in New York, is revealing. It shows the unconventional nature lover attempting to develop a writing career
in the conventional way
. He was not well accepted by the New York literary world, which saw him as impossibly rough-hewn and ordinary. He
was
rough-hewn, of course. Nathaniel Hawthorne describes his face: “
Thoreau is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queer-mouthed, and with uncouth and rustic, though courteous, manners, corresponding very well with such an exterior.” Thoreau himself laughingly commented on his beak of a nose, which he called “my most prominent feature.” But Hawthorne (who was himself supremely handsome) adds an important modifier to his description: “… his ugliness is of an honest and agreeable fashion, and becomes him much better than beauty.”

Thoreau tried to sparkle in the literary salons of New York. The attempt fell flat. He tried to style his prose to appeal to the fashions of the day. His work was mediocre—and widely disregarded. Throughout his entire year in New York, Thoreau never managed to publish more than
one slim book review, in spite of his powerful determination to be published with the big boys. Eventually, toward the end of his stay, the pain of rejection forced him to reach even more deeply into his own unique gift. Who am I? What is my voice? What 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.

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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. 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 bigger
than 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 Chögyam
Trungpa, 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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