“God made the world round so we could not see too far down the road.” Isak Dinesen wrote those words in her book, Out of Africa. It’s one of my favorite quotes because it captures the capriciousness of life. The impermanence,
We go along from day to day, taking the next moment for granted, rarely acknowledging that we are inching along on a narrow ledge on the side of a mountain that borders a bottomless abyss. And then the phone rings. And your whole carefully constructed house of cards collapses. It was built on sand anyway. We just didn’t want to admit that.
We humans love to tell each other stories. From prehistoric times we have told each other stories. Myths. Zen koans. Norse sagas. The point of many of those stories is to provide lessons, inspire us, encourage us so we can learn how others handled the inevitable and continued on. If they can do it, our thinking goes, so can I.
Joseph Campbell referenced that when he wrote of the hero’s journey. The hero leaves his home, starts on a quest, faces trials and returns transformed.
I had none of that in mind when I wrote A Passionate Adventure. I was writing a book, not a saga. I was driven to write it only out of a compulsion not to let the extraordinary life of my wife turn to dust and blow away on the wind.
But when I finished the book and read it from the beginning, with fresh eyes, I realized I had inadvertently created a saga. We had left our comfortable lives, thrown our lot in with each other, set off on a quest, faced enough challenges to fill several lifetimes and returned transformed. It didn’t seem that way at the time. It was just life.
But Joseph Campbell would have recognized a pattern in our lives.
The subtitle of the book, Leaving Life with No Regrets, is from a line Jo gave to me years before, in another context. I added it after the book was finished because I saw that our determination to press on regardless was a common denominator in how we handled adversity. We feared not trying more than we feared failure. It became our touchstone.
The Universe ended our journey but we were two very different people than the two who started out thinking it was never going to end.
My sense is in reading A Passionate Adventure you will find some inspiration to confront the challenges in your life. If we did it, you can too. No special equipment needed.
Gotta go…
