The Unheroic Journey

Today I closed the lights and locked the door on final day of work. I hesitated for a moment looking back at the darkened office where I has spent so much time over the past year and a half and expended so much effort and frustration. There were good times and bad and it was an eerie sitcom-ish moment. Like closing the lights on Cheers or JD leaving the hospital at the end of Scrubs. The moment was just that though, a moment, and it passed. I walk out the door never to return… until I got to my car and realized I had forgotten to drop off some deposit slips and I had to go running back up two flights of stairs and burst back into the door I thought I would never enter again. All and all it ended in my usually anti-climactic matter.

Now, all that is ahead of me is the Land of Oz. I am less than a month away and my journey is finally about to begin. I stand at the precipice of this new adventure like Alice at the rabbit hole, Ulysses at the shores of Troy, or even like Rod Albright at the foot of the good ship Furkel. (An obscure Aliens Ate My Homework reference… look it up…) I of course have less of a sense of destiny surrounding my trip than they did theirs. I have been told by several sources that this will be a trip that will define me. That I will come back a new person... In a way I would like to believe that, but there are reasons I named this blog: The Unheroic Journey. Mostly I see myself doing touristy things and trying to find a place to do laundry. Still I suppose my journey, in some ways, might mimic the Hero’s Journey. (A less obscure Joseph Campbell reference… look that up too)

In the Hero’s Journey there are many steps and temptations, most of which have been laid out and categorized by mythic scholars like a list or recipe on how to create a hero. Of course, that was then quickly exploited by many writers as a formula for adventure stories… I’m looking at you George Lucas… However, I cannot point fingers as I have used it in my own writings and found there to be a lot of truth in it. At the true heart of the hero’s journey, it is really a metaphor for growing. Luke Skywalker wears white in A New Hope and is wearing black by the time of Return of the Jedi. This is no mistake as it symbolizes that his innocent youthful self (white) has grown into the confident and powerful adult (black) with a greater understanding of the world. Maybe in a lot of ways that is the journey I am looking for.

It is something interesting to think about, and principally I have always been fascinated with mythology. Maybe parallels do exist between those old stories and our human experience. I mean most have survived since the dawn of human writing. Yet, if there is a connection between Aeneas and myself I am not saying I am going to find it in Australia, (nor am I looking for it). Really I am just trying to explain the name of my blog, so people will stop asking me.