'The Assignment'

The Bhagavad Gita — the foundational text of Hindu philosophy, composed somewhere between the fifth and second centuries BCE — opens on a battlefield. Arjuna, the warrior, refuses to fight. He looks across the field at the people he will have to kill and cannot do it. Krishna, serving as his charioteer, then delivers eighteen chapters of instruction. The central principle of all of it: act without attachment to outcome. Do what is yours to do, completely, without performing it for approval, without withholding it from fear. The doing is the point. The result is not yours to control.

Karma yoga — the yoga of action — is the practice of doing the work that is yours to do with your whole self, every time, whether or not the audience is watching, whether or not the outcome is certain, whether or not you will receive recognition for having done it. The flower does not bloom strategically. It does not time its opening for the moment of maximum audience. It opens when it is ready, because it is a flower and that is what flowers do.

The assignment was not given to you by the world. It was given to you by whatever made you.

This is for the woman who is learning to do her work without apologizing for it — and without requiring the world to tell her it was worth doing.