The Great Work of Your Life

And she knew that most likely the vote would not come in her lifetime. “Not in our day,” she wrote, “but we must work on for future generations.”

He now talked about his love of poetry as naïve, and though he appreciated that aspect of himself, he thought it was best left behind in favor of “really growing up.”

Like Frost’s, our job is to make choices that create the right conditions for dharma to flourish. The Gift is indestructible. It is a seed. We are not required to be God. We are not required to create the seed. Only to plant it wisely and well.

You know that if you don’t go into training and suit up and show up every morning at your writing desk, these wonderful moments will in fact never happen. So you train as religiously as you can. Now you are hooked by dharma—by the magic of inaction in action.

Frost understood that the poet’s chief job is to create the right conditions for the blossoming of The Gift. He understood that he needed a chrysalis—a quiet, contemplative life—with plenty of leisure for writing, reading, thinking, contemplating.

first, anxious for the cause and depressed with a sense of her own inability; next, partial success of timid efforts creating a hope; next, a faith; and then the fruition of complete self-devotion.

In order to fulfill her dharma, she would have to master the art of public speaking, she would have to learn how to unleash her power in full view of halls of angry men and skeptical women.

By the age of twenty-five, Susan B. Anthony had made a conscious choice to remain single.

View in the Farnese Gardens