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

they just as easily be the call to reinvent ourselves? As we age it seems harder and harder to let our authentic dharma reinvent us. We imagine somehow that the risks are greater. We tend to think that leaping off cliffs is for the young. But no. Actually—when better to leap off cliffs? (T. S. Eliot said it: “Old men ought to be explorers.”)
    The fear of leaping is, of course, the fear of death. It is precisely the fear of being used up. And dharma does use us up, to be sure. But why not be used up giving everything we’ve got to the world? This is precisely what Krishna teaches Arjuna: You cannot hold on to your life. You don’t need to. You are immortal. “Our bodies are known to end, but the embodied self is enduring, indestructible, and immeasurable; therefore, Arjuna, fight the battle!”
    The Gift is not for its own sake. It is for the common good. It is for The Times.
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    At the end of the war it became Walt Whitman’s self-assigned duty to make sense of its unimaginable suffering—including Lincoln’s assassination, which came just days after Lee’s surrender to Grant at Appomattox. Right away, Whitman saw the meaning of the assassination—and he saw it in Krishnean terms: “He was assassinated—but the Union is not assassinated … The Nation is immortal.”
    Whitman began to work on an elegy to describe the meaning of the war. He called it, “Retrievements Out of the Night.” It was perhaps his greatest poem. It was written for all the bruised and broken young men. The poem was saturated with death:
    Come lovely and soothing death,
    Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
    In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
    Sooner or later delicate death.
    Here were commingled the memories of the dead soldiers and their dead commander—the president. It was a triumph of a poem—written in the thrall of dharma. It was the last great poem of Whitman’s career.
    Whitman’s poetic genius could not be for himself alone. His deeper gifts revealed themselves when put in the service of the times and of the greatest need. Having been put in the service of humanity, his gift was ennobled, transformed. His words helped turn the dark wound of the Civil War into a kind of transcendent light. Whitman had developed an expansive consciousness that saw into the meaning of things. This is, after all, what a poet does. He had infused his poetic spirit into his “missionary” work in the hospitals. He had turned his life into a poem—a work of art—in the most unlikely of places: the Civil War hospital tent.
    We see here the themes that will occupy the rest of the book: Selflessness. Sacrifice. Surrender. Not just responsibility to The Gift itself, but responsibility to give it
in the way that is called forth
. Krishna says, “Strive constantly to serve the welfare of the world; by devotion to selfless work one attains the supreme goal of life. Do your work with the welfare of others always in mind.”
    By the end of the war, Whitman was used up. The photographs of him before and after the war show him stunningly aged and transformed. Through his work in the hospital tents he gave himself away. But he also found himself.
    After the war, Whitman experienced a long, slow decline in health. He would never be the same. But he did not count the cost. “There were years in my life—years there in New York—when I wondered if all was not going to the bad with America—the tendency downwards—but the war saved me: what I saw in the war set me up for all time—the days in the hospitals.”
    The Civil War saved the Union. But it also saved Walt Whitman. It saved him from a life trapped in self. It called forth from him his highest, noblest vision of mankind—and in speaking this vision, he made it so.Like Thoreau, he had discovered the power of authentic words to change the world.
    Dharma is born mysteriously out of the intersection between The Gift and The Times. Dharma is a response to the