Departure

The Call to Adventure

The phone rings in the middle of the night
My father yells, "Whatchu gonna do with your life?"
Oh, daddy dear
You know you're still number one
But girls, they wanna have fu-un

It is 3:30 Saturday night, or Sunday morning, depending on how you look at things. In the distance a siren wails. Later, I’ll probably get a press release from the City of New Haven or their Police Department about the latest shooting. Somewhere in the house, a cellphone beeps. It’s batteries are dying.

I was pretty tired so I went to bed early last night. Now, I am awake and I guess it is time to explore ‘Life as Monomyth’.

The idea comes out of Story.lab, a project of The Grove in New Haven. Fridays at lunch time, Ken Janke has been leading a discussion on ‘authoring your story as mission’. There have been some fascinating discussions and these are but a few of my thoughts about them.

Last week, I brought up the idea of the Monomyth, the common narrative about heroes so well described in Joseph Campbell’s book, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, which later became the PBS special “The Power of Myth”. If we are to author our stories as mission, perhaps we would be well advised to look at the Monomyth as the framework.

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear

It seems like there are a lot of people struggling with this idea, and what they gonna do with their lives, but there is something happening here. It’s around GoogleHaven and The Grove, and something else, something bigger.

At times, I’ve spoken about a twenty first century digitally enabled ‘Great Awakening’. I’m still not sure exactly what that might be like, but I wonder if it is some how related to the call to adventure.

Refusal of the Call

Yet the Monomyth often continues with a “Refusal of the Call”. Perhaps it is just something about ordinary life that is more appealing. I remember when my first marriage ended, various people offered various thoughts about how to deal with it. I started seeing a therapist who observed that I seemed committed to a 1950s version of the American Family. Perhaps that was my view of the ordinary life not to be disrupted. An organizational consultant I was working with spoke about the return of the hero from the Monomyth and the responsibility to bring back the boon from the adventure to the community. It was the first time I started thinking about life as monomyth.

There is something comforting about family, whether it be a 1950‘s traditional family or a twenty first century modern family. Kim captured some of this nicely in a book she had printed of the first ten years of our life together.

Yet it isn’t just a desire for a traditional family that might be used by some to refuse the call. Some might suggest that the whole construct is flawed. No, life should not be monomyth, it should be performance art.

It is the responsibility of the artist to laugh and jeer and belch and howl at the common delusion that infinite generations of causes can be inferred from effects.

It has been probably thirty years since I read the play Travesties by Tom Stoppard, so I may be misquoting it, but the idea is there. What about life as performance art, laughing and belching at causality? What about art for art’s sake or life for life’s sake? On the one hand, this could take us to Cyndi Lauper. On the other hand, it could take us back to the Zen Masters.

A monk told Joshu: `I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.'
Joshu asked: `Have you eaten your rice porridge?'
The monk replied: `I have eaten.'
Joshu said: `Then you had better wash your bowl.'
At that moment the monk was enlightened.

Are these just aspects of trying to refuse the call, or are there insights here about the journey?

Supernatural Aid

Perhaps, the muses of the artists or the spirits of family or of enlightenment are just forms of the supernatural aid that often comes in the hero myth. Often with this comes some sort of talisman. What are the talismans in our lives? What do they represent?

To be continued...?

There is so much more to the monomyth and how we could think about it in our own lives. As I glance at sections about crossing the first threshold and the belly of the whale, I have to wonder, where am I in my monomyth? Have I crossed the first threshold? Am I in the belly of the whale? Am I somewhere else in the monomyth?

At the second Story.Lab meeting, one person spoke about Jesuits asking people to write their stories when they turned fifty and writing out where they saw the rest of their story going. It made me think of Hermann Hesse whom people say claimed that you should not read what he wrote before he was fifty and you should only read it after you turn fifty. There were other comments about people finding their calling in their fifties. I am now in my fifties.

An hour later, the cat has asked to go out. I’ve taken the dog out briefly as well and feel as if I’ve probably written enough for right now. Yet, I come back to the monomyth, as well as another story form. Sometimes the monomyth is presented as a circle. Other story forms are also often circular, with each circle leading to a new level. There are stories of destruction and re-creation. Perhaps, I am just looking at another cycle of the the monomyth.

And the seasons they go 'round and 'round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and 'round and 'round
In the circle game