The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  “I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one-hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.”

  Every dot and stroke I paint will be alive!

  Here was a man who was on fire for his work. I wanted to know more: Did he indeed live to be a hundred and forty? What did those later dots and strokes look like?”

  I sat down on the bench in front of the print and made some notes. “Katsushika Hokusai. 1760–1849. Japanese printmaker. Leading Japanese expert on Chinese painting. Master of the Ukiyo-e form. Nichiren Buddhist.”

  Later, at home, I Googled Hokusai. He died at eighty-nine, and sure enough, on his deathbed—still looking to penetrate deeper into his art—he had exclaimed, “If only heaven will give me just another ten years!… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”

  Hokusai was a man who saw his work as a means to “penetrate to the essential nature” of things. And he appears to have succeeded. His work, a hundred and fifty years after his death, could reach right off a gallery wall and grab me in the gut.

  More than anything, I was intrigued by the quality of Hokusai’s passion for his work. He helped me see that a life devoted to dharma can be a deeply ardent life.

  2

  In the first part of “the wondrous dialogue,” Krishna and Arjuna speak of dharma—its nature, and its role on the path of the fully alive human being. We have spoken so far of what we might call the discernment phase of dharma—the process of sniffing out dharma at every turn. Now comes a new phase: Having found your dharma, embrace it fully and passionately. Bring everything you’ve got to it. Do it full out!

  “Considering your dharma, you should not vacillate,” Krishna instructed Arjuna. The vacillating mind is the split mind. The vacillating mind is the doubting mind—the mind at war with itself. “The ignorant, indecisive and lacking in faith, waste their lives,” says Krishna. “They can never be happy in this world or any other.” Ouch.

  Well, this Hokusai character was a guy who had not dithered on the path, and had clearly not wasted his life. In fact, he doesn’t seem to have wasted an instant. An interesting aspect of fulfilled lives is that the people who are living them seem to have learned how to gather their energy, how to focus—how to, as we might say these days, “bring it.” Like Hokusai, their lives begin to look like guided missiles.

  How exactly do they accomplish this? How do you get from where most of us live—the run-of-the-mill split mind—to the gathered mind of a Hokusai?

  Krishna articulates the principle succinctly: Acting in unity with your purpose itself creates unification. Actions that consciously support dharma have the power to begin to gather our energy. These outward actions, step-by-step, shape us inwardly. Find your dharma and do it. And in the process of doing it, energy begins to gather itself into a laser beam of effectiveness.

  Krishna quickly adds: Do not worry about the outcome. Success or failure are not your concern. It is better to fail at your own dharma than to succeed at the dharma of another. Your task is only to bring as much life force as you can muster to the execution of your dharma. In this spirit, Chinese Master Guan Yin Tzu wrote: “Don’t waste time calculating your chances of success and failure. Just fix your aim and begin.”

  Krishna now begins the task of teaching Arjuna the Doctrine of Unified Action, which explicitly lays out the case for focus. The Doctrine of Unified Action is a pillar of the yoga tradition. The word yoga, in all its various iterations, always and everywhere means “to yoke.” In the case of the yoga of action, it means to yoke all of one’s being to dharma. To bring every action into alignment with your highest purpose. To bring everything you’ve got to the task.

  American writer Annie Dillard stumbled onto this principle early on in her writing career. She declares it in her book The Writing Life. “One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you.”

  Give freely and abundantly! Abundance is a central aspect of this principle. When you commit fully to the task at hand, the abundance of your commitment itself has magic in it. It draws your energies together. It calls up energies you didn’t know you had. As some have said, under these conditions the universe comes to your aid.

  Naturally, there is an obstacle to all this wonderment. Alas, it turns out that the process of unification requires saying “no” to actions that do not support dharma—saying “no” to detours, and to side channels of all kinds, even to some pretty terrific side channels. It requires snipping off all manner of “other options.” The root of the word “decide” means, literally, “to cut off.” To decide for something means at times to decide against something else.

  This is, of course, why those infernal crossroads are so difficult. Cutting off options is hard work. And it is risky. But the alternative is even riskier. Those who cannot commit, those who cannot say “no,” are doomed to everlasting conflict. They may sit for a lifetime at the crossroads, dithering. Krishna nails this principle: “Those who follow this path, resolving deep within themselves to see Me alone, attain singleness of purpose. For those who lack resolution, the decisions of life are many-branched and endless.” Many-branched and endless. How well we know.

  Because this principle is so important, and because Arjuna is so very likely to lose his tenuous grasp on it, Krishna reminds him over and over again throughout their dialogue. “The disunited mind is far from wise,” he nudges. The mind “must overcome the confusion of duality.”

  If we have been paying the slightest attention to decades of self-help literature, we will not have failed to have heard this same cry. I particularly like American writer Elbert Hubbard’s hefty jab for unification: “The difference in men does not lie in the size of their hands, nor in the perfection of their bodies, but in this one sublime ability of concentration: to throw the weight in one blow, to live eternity in an hour.”

  We derive the greatest pleasure and fulfillment when all our faculties are drawn together into our life’s work. In this state of absorption, we experience extraordinary satisfaction. We human beings are attracted to the experience of intense involvement. The outcome of this involvement, says Hokusai, is sublime. “By ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature.” Hokusai’s lesson, finally, is that a life of passion for dharma is a fulfilled life.

  In Part III, then, we will explore the Second Pillar of Dharma, “Do It Full Out!” And we’ll look at three principles of the Doctrine of Unified Action.

  1. Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

  2. Unify!

  3. Practice deliberately.

  In Chapter Five, we will examine the early life of the American poet Robert Frost, looking closely at the way he made decisions in support of dharma. In Chapter Six, we will examine the surprising life of Susan B. Anthony, and the many ways in which she systematically unified her energy, becoming, finally, an authentic force of n
ature. And in Chapter Seven, we will look at one of the world’s greatest landscape painters, the nineteenth-century French master Camille Corot, and examine closely our growing understanding of the concept of “deliberate practice” and its intriguing relationship to dharma. Along the way, we’ll look, too, at two ordinary lives—those of my friends Ethan and Lonny—and the ways in which they do or do not manage to grasp the full import of unified action.

  FIVE

  Robert Frost: Find Out Who You Are and Do It on Purpose

  At eighteen years of age I arrived as a first-year student at Amherst College, (a small liberal arts college in western Massachusetts), fresh-plucked from the farm in Ohio. I knew oh-so-little about life. And almost nothing about New England, into whose throbbing heart I had just been transplanted. I knew nothing about her saints and poets and mystics. I knew nothing, even, about one of her chief priests: the poet Robert Frost.

  This would soon change. I discovered that the mammoth fact of Robert Frost could simply not be avoided—especially at Amherst College. Frost himself had died a few years before I arrived, and this had given wings to the legend. His name was everywhere, and the college reveled in its association with him. The new Robert Frost Library had just been completed, with its rough-hewn granite foundation, and its more delicate brick and glass stories above. The poet, everyone said, “would have approved.”

  If that were not enough, several of my new friends in college had committed some portion of Frost’s canon to memory, and were apt to recite Frost’s poems at the least provocation. Imagine with me, if you will, one such new friend whom I will call Ethan—who will represent the spirit of many of my new friends who had fallen in love with, and could freely recite, Robert Frost. Occasionally these recitations were haunting—as when Ethan and I and two other friends huddled around a campfire on a late October camping trip to Vermont. We had just spent the day hiking through woods blazing with fall color, and I was on fire with the flinty smell and feel of New England. To complete the mood, Ethan treated us to a mesmerizing recitation of “The Road Not Taken”—astonishingly enough, my first hearing of Robert Frost’s most ubiquitous poem. I will never forget it. The sweet-acrid smell of the woods, the glow-in-the-dark faces of my new friends around the fire, the intentionally slow, incantatory tone of Ethan’s voice.

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  Then took the other, as just as fair,

  And having perhaps the better claim,

  Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

  Though as for that the passing there

  Had worn them really about the same,

  And both that morning equally lay

  In leaves no step had trodden black.

  Oh, I kept the first for another day!

  Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

  I doubted if I should ever come back.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  When he finished there was silence, save for the crackling of the fire. And into the silence, several minutes later, Ethan “said” the poem again. (Frost famously “said” his poems, rather than “recited” them.)

  I was an eighteen-year-old, and had just made the first major decision of my life: the choice of a college. Would it be Amherst, or the College of Wooster, in Ohio, or Hamilton College, in New York? Of course, I did not have the word “dharma” in my vocabulary then. But the college choice had been the biggest dharma decision of my life thus far. The poem Ethan recited that magical night—which is about what we do at crossroads—was full of hidden meaning and import for me. I secretly believed this very camping trip proved that I had chosen well. Look where I was. And who I was with: exotic new friends who recited poetry in the woods at night. Look what a turn my life had taken out of the mundanity (as I thought) of Ohio. My decision was the right one. And I was experiencing the power of choice. Observe, I thought: I had already taken the road less traveled.

  Frost haunted me. At first entirely through Ethan. But the poet slowly became my own. From my first hearing of Frost’s words, I felt some strange kinship with him, as if his was a voice I had known somewhere long, long ago, and was just rediscovering. He evoked in me a kind of nostalgia for a past that seemed to have faded into a near dream.

  Strangely, Frost describes his own process of making poetry in a very similar fashion—as a kind of homecoming to a lost part of himself. “For me,” he says, “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” In a new poem, he wrote, he “meets himself coming home.”

  By the time I returned to Ohio for Christmas vacation, I had already committed my first Frost poem to memory. I repeated it to myself over and over again as I walked the snow-swept fields of my boyhood town, as if introducing my past to my future. I loved the feel of the words in my mouth:

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favor fire.

  But if I had to perish twice,

  I think I know enough of hate

  To say that for destruction ice

  Is also great

  And would suffice.

  Some say the world will end in fire. Oh, the sound of it! Before I left for Ohio, I “said” this poem once in Ethan’s presence, rattling it off with poorly disguised pride while on a hike across the Holyoke Range. He smiled but said nothing.

  2

  Frost, of course, became the most lauded American poet of his century—winning no less than four Pulitzer Prizes (a record) and single-handedly remaking American poetry.

  His life is, then, naturally, a treasure trove of stories about dharma. But to my mind, the most interesting story is the series of courageous early choices Frost made in support of his dharma. When one examines Frost’s life closely, it becomes clear that this man became more and more himself through a series of small decisions that aligned him with his voice. He had a gift, of course. But his power came into focus through his commitment to this gift, and through a series of decisive actions taken in support of it. Each one of these acts was, for him, like jumping off a cliff. He jumped not entirely blind—but not entirely seeing, either. And each of Frost’s leaps ignited more of his power. In retrospect, it is clear that each one of Frost’s difficult decisions helped create the perfect conditions for the full flowering of his genius. He chose relentlessly over and over again—in small ways and in large—for his dharma. His remarkable career was the fruit of these decisions.

  Frost’s early years were spent finding out who he was. But his later years were spent increasingly being who he was on purpose. As he himself said, the story of his life is the story of someone becoming more and more himself. He later wrote:

  They would not find me changed from him they knew—

  Only more sure of all I thought was true.

  3

  From early on, Robert Frost had an ear for “voice”—for the good story, the compelling colloquialism, the rough-hewn sound of local speech. Very often, he discovered the power of words—and their flinty patterns—while he was at work. Even as a boy, Frost loved physical work. “I liked to try myself out in a job,” he once recalled, “helping a man load a wagon, pile firewood, rake or hoe. It was all odd jobs in those days. I liked working with characters, listening to them, their stories, the way they had to tell a story—the country was full of characters.”

  Young Robbie loved hearing his mother read to him at
night. He felt soothed by her voice. And his imagination was alive with the stories she read: Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather; traditional ballads; Scottish tales. Also poetry: Ossian, Poe, Wordsworth, Longfellow, and Bryant.

  Frost’s life developed an interesting rhythm: working on a farm during the day—haying, using a pitchfork, learning how to use a scythe. And studying the classics at night. He studied poetry. He read the Latin poets. He began to tinker with writing small poems, especially as a way of integrating moments of powerful feeling.

  Frost himself told and retold the story of writing his first poem. The poem, later published by The Independent, was titled, “My Butterfly.” He was just twenty years old. “I wrote it all in one go in the kitchen of our house on Tremont Street,” Frost said. “I locked the door and all the time I was working, Jeanie my sister tried to batter it down and get in.” And as he wrote that first poem, Frost recalls, he had a profound sense that “something was happening. It was like cutting along a nerve.”

  I have often heard artists describe this “cutting along a nerve.” Sculptor Anne Truitt said, “The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” Frost found the experience exhilarating.

  “My Butterfly” was Frost’s first published poem. When The Independent editor William Hayes Ward saw it, he recognized the genius there. Ward later questioned Frost: Who are you? Where did you come from? What was your education? Frost had to admit to Ward that he did not have a college education at all. He declared that it was his love for poetry—and his ambition to write great poetry—that had compelled his self-training. “To love poetry is to study it,” he said to Ward. (Frost became one of America’s greatest autodidacts.)

  By the age of twenty, Frost had fallen in love with words, and had decided that he would be a poet—though he did not know how this would come to be. He set himself very intentionally on a training program to study the great poets. “Specifically speaking,” he said to Ward, “the few rules I know in this art are my own afterthoughts, or else directly formulated from the masterpieces I reread.”