Musing #16: The Hero's Journey
The more I learn about story telling, the more life feels amazing and worth living.
But first…
🙏 Sunday Gratitude:
Today I want to honor one of my closest friends, heroes, supporters, teachers and co-creators: Stacie Blanke. Thank you so fucking much for supporting me on being the wildest creative version of myself. What you do for people is magical.
Paul, her and I recorded a Gumpcast episode in the still-being-produced season 2 about the power of self-expression and about her work in bringing the freedom of Improvisation to the workplace.
She offers one-on-one sessions and group workshops as well. Check out her work with Speechless in the link on her name.
Honestly, without friends like Stacie and Paul and the rest of you out there - you know who you are- showing up here every week would be ridiculously hard.
My biggest intention for you and I, through this blog, is for us to heal through each other's stories.
The more I study story structure and dig deeper into outlining the novel, the more my own story is starting to make sense to me.
💡 Obstacles become less of the end of the world and more of my "Dark night of the Soul" which I will conquer.
💡 Losing people, things and jobs becomes a sacrifice for something more worthwhile, and the victories in my life can now be either false or true ones depending on whether I think I learned my lesson.
💡 Perhaps the biggest teaching of all though, is that change is inevitable, and change is actually the whole point of life.
💡 So I embrace change today fully and completely, and hope that you can do the same.
Here is a deeper dive into Joseph Cambell's book and my own journey with religion in that context. Enjoy!
The gist of it all is this: We start in a familiar place, but something is missing or wanted by us. One day we get a call for adventure, which takes us into an unfamiliar transformation zone, which we then adapt to, and sacrifice something to get what we wanted. Ultimately, we go back to the familiar place, but having changed ourselves, and can now bring that change to where we started.
Sounds familiar? Where are you on the journey?
Here is a post from a year ago if you want to dig deeper:
I can’t wait to respond and reconnect with you all in the email responses and the comments.
Omar
I'm not sure these phases are discrete. Or linear. I think we experience many of these phases at the same time, and go back and forth between them. I think the one constant through them all is change. Maybe change is always there, buzzing around behind the scenes, an invisible backdrop to everything else that is happening in our lives.
Change is inevitable. Much is beyond our control. So much of my life has been spent responding and adjusting to changes I never asked for, didn't want, and don't welcome. Death of a loved one and illness have been the hardest for me, but the list is long! Change can also be positive even though it feels scary at the time. It can be the kick in the ass we need to move on and out: the job I got passed over for; the friend who betrayed me.
And yet, all of these changes, which I wouldn't have sought and didn't welcome, turned out to have made me stronger. As Hemingway wrote in A Farewell to Arms, "The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places...."
I'm not sure if I answered your question, Omar. Thank you for sharing your journey and asking about ours.
This is so timely for me. Thanks man! I’ve been thinking a lot about Sterling Hawkins’ book “Hunting Discomfort” and Ryan Holiday’s “The Obstacle Is The Way”. That what we want most is often on the other side of what scares / challenges us most. Sometimes it makes me mad, but I think I’m closer to a place of acceptance and working toward finding meaning.