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Joseph Campbell introduced the thrilling idea of The Hero’s Journey is his compendium The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Suddenly, men could understand their motives—and their relationships with their fathers, careers, wives, and sons more clearly.
And movie studios suddenly knew how to structure a movie.
It’s pretty simple. . . .
A guy is called to adventure out of his dying land. He resists.
On page 10 of a 120-page script, an inciting incident thrusts him out across a river and into the strange new world where he undergoes his “road of trials.”
He meets wise mentors, gains amulets, and special weapons (new wisdom), to handle his new enemies; then, around page 75, comes to a place of death where he must face his deepest fear (the dragon).
By page 90, the hero fights the dragon, dies, is resurrected, slays the dragon, grabs the treasure and heads home where his treasure (his transformative wisdom) re-greens the land that was dying (meaning his tribe, or his soul) in the opening scene.
It’s a seductive, universal and self-enclosed tale.
It speaks most obviously to young men who know they have to break free from their fathers, and from what is “dead” in their lives, what is dad’s residue, static, unsatisfying, rote, boring, used-up, not really “theirs” and uninspiring.
What most people don’t realize is that Campbell never intended this cycle to stand in for mere college seniors with a Eurailpass nor for a two-hour movie.
If we are awake to our evolving selves, then the inspiring life-decisions we made in the past may very likely not inspire us anymore.
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It’s a process that we men go through over and over again because our lives become stale over and over again.
We make inspiring decisions at 20 about our career that lose their allure by 30.
We get into inspiring relationships at 30 that feel like anchors around our neck by 40.
We want to flee our routines at 40 in what most people call “a mid-life crisis,” but I call it a “mid-life awakening.”
At 50, what seemed exciting and social in the past suddenly seems noisy, annoying, and puerile. Gimme a glass of peaty scotch and woodshop.
If we are awake to our evolving selves, then the inspiring life-decisions we made in the past may very likely not inspire us anymore.
Our once-green pastures dry up.
What fascinated us loses its luster because we’ve figured the thing out and our imaginations have moved on to new challenges—even if the activities of our lives are lagging behind.
One of the themes that keep arising in the interviews with the wise men of The Inspired Man Summit is that men—if we are to live inspired and fulfilling lives—need to stay alert to what inspires us NOW.
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A relationship that once nurtured a dominant aspect of our growth feels superfluous when that aspect is integrated and no longer dominant.
In other words, we change.
But unless we are awake to our inner world, we get stuck living out our old “hero’s journey” even though that story has ended.
We forget to make the sequel(s).
One of the themes that keep arising in the interviews with the wise men of The Inspired Man Summit is that men—if we are to live inspired and fulfilling lives—need to stay alert to what inspires us NOW.
And that in the hurly-burly of working life, bill-paying, gym-hitting, child-rearing, aging-parent-care and just trying to make it through the day—we lose track of our inner voices and true desires.
We lose track of what genuinely inspires us today—and something in us dies.
In The Inspired Man Summit, we explore 16 ways to self-attune, to wake-up to what’s real now, what is inspiring now, what calls to our souls now. . . .
Then, we learn how to cut the line to the dock and set out again, to act boldly based on what enlivens us, rather than mindlessly repeating half-hearted activities that rightfully belong to our past and long-finished hero’s journey cycles.
The horizon beckons.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
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