The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  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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  From an early age, Jane was drawn to animals and to the natural world. Here, in an excerpt from her autobiography, she recounts a tale of her life as a four-year-old on the family farm in the English countryside.

  One of my tasks was to collect the hens’ eggs. As the days passed, I became more and more puzzled. Where on a chicken was there an opening big enough for an egg to come out? Apparently no one explained this properly, so I must have decided to find out for myself. I followed a hen into one of the little wooden henhouses—but of course, as I crawled after her she gave horrified squawks and hurriedly left. My young brain must have then worked out that I would have to be there first. So I crawled into another henhouse and waited, hoping a hen would come in to lay. And there I remained, crouched silently in one corner, concealed in some straw, waiting.

  Jane then—at four years of age, mind you—waited patiently for hours, simply observing what was happening with the bird. Meanwhile, outside the henhouse, her family was in a panic. Where was Baby Jane?

  Jane continues her narration:

  At last, a hen came in, scratched about in the straw, and settled herself on her makeshift nest just in front of me. I must have kept very still or she would have been disturbed. Presently the hen half stood and I saw a round white object gradually protruding from the feathers between her legs. Suddenly with a plop, the egg landed on the straw. With clucks of pleasure the hen shook her feathers, nudged the egg with her beak, and left. It is quite extraordinary how clearly I remember that whole sequence of events.

  What comes next is important. Jane had been missing for over four hours. The household had taken to search-and-rescue mode. Excited, Jane rushed out of the henhouse, eager to tell her story. When her mother, Vanne, saw Jane, she rushed to her.

  … despite her worry, when Vanne [Jane’s mother] saw the excited little girl rushing toward the house, she did not scold me. She noticed my shining eyes and sat down to listen to the story of how a hen lays an egg: the wonder of that moment when the egg finally fell to the ground.

  Where in the world did this mother come from? Where was the spanking I would have received—and would have thought perfectly justified?

  Rather: “She noticed my shining eyes.”

  Children cannot understand the full import of The Gift. They can only feel their spirit leap up toward their object of interest—can only feel the delightful energy of fascination and enthusiasm (from the root en theos, literally, “the God within”). Until we develop true introspection and reflective intelligence in our teens, we cannot put these gifts into any kind of perspective at all. Only later, with the development of a mature, observing ego can we assess the kinds of potential these gifts have within them.

  So, early on, these gifts must be seen and reflected by an intelligence that has such perspective. Trust in The Gift must be nurtured by parents, teachers, friends. The moment must not pass by unnoticed. We must be encouraged to identify with our gifts. We rely on others to see our shining eyes. Without this mirroring, we cannot understand the meaning or import of our fascination.

  By the time she was four years old, Jane’s gift for animals had already been seen. Named. Celebrated. Jane began to develop trust in The Gift. And only this kind of trust will allow us to learn to take risks in pursuit of The Gift—risks that will often be required in the expression of dharma.

  Said Jane as an adult, “I was lucky to be provided with a mother wise enough to nurture and encourage my love of living things and my passion for knowledge.”

  This is a whopping understatement. It gets better. The very same brilliant mom—Vanne—followed Jane into the wilds of Tanzania and supported her, kept house for her (rather, “kept hut for her”) as she developed her first jungle station to work with chimpanzees. A native Tanzanian forest ranger, upon first meeting these two women fresh off the boat, “assumed,” reflects Jane, “upon depositing these two crazy Englishwomen at their first camp that they would pull up stakes within a few weeks.”

  “Little did they know,” said Jane.

  Who does not read in amazement the account of Vanne, deep in middle age, trekking to Tanzania, and living in a precarious and frightening lakeside camp (later there was mass murder just across the lake) while her daughter spent nights alone in the jungle with the chimps? Crazy Englishwomen.

  Vanne not only felt compelled to reflect Jane’s gift to her. She felt a responsibility to The Gift. I suspect that Vanne had not read the Bhagavad Gita, but there she would have found this very teaching. We have a responsibility to The Gift. The Gift is God in disguise.

  In Jane Goodall we have a fairly uncommon example of a life in which just about everything was working to support dharma. But isn’t it good to know that these things can happen? “I had a mother who not only tolerated but also encouraged my passion for nature and animals and who, even more important, taught me to believe in myself,” wrote Jane.

  Taught me to believe in myself.

  One of the lessons of Jane’s life: It only takes one person. There were not a lot of others lining up to support Jane in her decades of life with the chimps. Most saw her choices as entirely strange, and rather gave her up for good when she disappeared into the jungle at age twenty-six, not to emerge again for decades.

  Jane’s autobiography is a compelling catalog of the maturation of gifts. She describes how, early in her years at Gombe, she had to follow the troop of chimps through the brush for hours or days at a time to get a single chimpanzee sighting. She waited patiently with them through dark nights for almost a year before a single chimp would even come within a hundred yards of her. Her patience was a maturation of the possibility she exhibited back in England as a four-year-old—resolutely watching that hen.

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  Quite honestly, as I read Goodall’s autobiography, I thought: Well, where was the struggle? Where was the doubt? I wanted to know what she left out. Those would have been the good parts, I thought. I really had trouble believing her story could be that good. But then I realized: This is what a life of certitude looks like. Rather than conflict and drama, all of Goodall’s energy went into her creativity, until finally she ignited into that bonfire of contribution to the world. Jane’s experience is what we might call the Direct Path to Dharma. It can happen. It is magnificent when it does.

  But my observation leads me to believe that Goodall’s story is the exception rather than the rule. As a person who has taken the Indirect Path to Dharma, I long to hear another story: What happens whe
n our gifts are not met with the same remarkable understanding and perspective that Jane encountered?

  Do you remember Brian, the Catholic priest whom I introduced in Chapter One? Now here is a man with whom I can identify.

  Brian is a man whose gifts were not seen or reflected to him as a child. He felt a calling to music even as a kid. When he was six, his uncle Kevin bought him a little blue plastic organ. It was for years his most precious possession (and still remains in the closet of his boyhood room). Brian soon transformed his motley crew of stuffed animals into a choir that he conducted from the little plastic bench that came with the organ. He even made himself a miniature choirmaster robe—from a yellowing sheet that he got his sister to sew. I just know his eyes were shining like crazy while he was directing that choir of bears and monkeys and giraffes. How could anyone miss that? You’d think his mother would have straightaway signed him up for choirmaster school.

  But Brian’s mother was not so interested in his stuffed-animal choir. She had big plans for Brian. He was going to become a priest. Every generation in her family—all the way back to Ireland—had had at least one priest, and she had no intention of being the mother who broke the tradition. It was a noble tradition; at least that’s what everyone said at Sunday family dinners after church. It was good for the family, and for the Church and for the world. And it was—she lost no opportunity in saying it—her deepest wish. Brian wanted to please his mother. Enough to put himself aside?

  Brian can remember the exact moment when he realized he would not be a church musician. He was fourteen. His mother was talking with pride to Uncle Kevin about Brian’s eventual destiny: “… maybe a monsignor, or even a bishop. He has the gift.” “What gift?” Brian wondered. He could feel his face redden. After a few minutes, he went to his room and cried into his pillow.

  The next day—and periodically over the next year—Brian talked the situation over with Sister Mary Joseph at school. She listened sympathetically, nodding her head in its starched habit. “Now, Brian,” she said with authentic kindness in her voice, which made the lesson go in deeper, “you have to understand that we don’t always get what we want. This is what adulthood is all about,” echoing almost perfectly Brian’s mother’s view. “Your mother knows more than you yet do about life. And I believe, too, that this is what God wants for you. And you know, it is very pleasing in God’s eyes to be a priest. This is a gift you will give to God.”

  “This is what adulthood is,” thought Brian. “I can do this.” He felt his spine stiffen.

  Brian surrendered to the call heard not by himself, but by his parents and teachers. What resulted was much more serious than anyone could have imagined. It was the silent tragedy of self-betrayal.

  Remember Krishna’s teaching: We cannot be anyone we want to be. We can only authentically be who we are. “The attempt to live out someone else’s dharma brings extreme spiritual peril,” says Krishna. Extreme spiritual peril!

  If you bring forth what is within you it will save you. If you do not, it will destroy you.

  And what, precisely, is destroyed?

  Energy is destroyed first. Those shining eyes. And then faith. And then hope. And then life itself.

  The increasing deadening of aliveness that Brian experienced as he went into the seminary is the very opposite of Jane Goodall’s experience. When a life is founded on self-betrayal, the habit of self-betrayal proliferates until we are at peril of not remembering who we are at all. There is a slow deadening of spirit as we try to pick up the burdens of adulthood without the energy of The Gift. Our work can be motivated by obligation, by hunger for the external rewards of accomplishment, or by strongly reinforced ideas about who we should be in this lifetime. But none of these motivations has the authentic energy required for mastery of a profession. So, all of these motivations lead slowly to a downward spiral that tends to crash, as it did with Brian, at midlife. Without the balm of real fulfillment there is a growing emptiness inside. Finally, it requires a heroic effort to simply go on with life in the face of this emptiness. The light in the eyes goes out.

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  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:

  “As David [the chimp] and I sat there, I noticed a ripe red fruit from an oil nut palm lying on the ground. I held it toward him on the palm of my hand. David glanced at me and reached to take the nut. He dropped it, but gently held my hand. I needed no words to understand his message of reassurance: he didn’t want the nut, but he understood my motivation, he knew I meant well.

  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.”

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  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 de
adening 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.