A hero:
Having the inner quality of courage, a hero will ‘do what’s right because it’s right.’ Confronting inner faults and outer public jealousies, facing unknown outcomes and having no regard to future glory, heroes have the courage to speak and live the truth to the best of their ability.

This balanced duality, the outer and inner journey, makes life meaningful and is the essence of our quest at any age.

Warning: Giving priority to outer growth, relegates our inner growth to a back-burner, creating an imbalance, a growing dissatisfaction. Our life will become meaningless and in this hollowness we hear the death bell toll long before we die.

Henry Thoreau explains:
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

We thwart quiet desperation when we ensure the inner quest, the song that is within us, keeps its place in our journey.

To embark on a hero’s journey, all we need is courage.

“Courage is the first virtue that makes all other virtues possible.” Aristotle

An Ordinary World is familiar and brings assurance.

And yet … your heart is restless.

Repeating a prior journey is not only impossible, it’s pointless.

The challenges of college, career, or kids have ended. Relics of the starry eyed teenage stage collect dust.

A new job, another cruise, or the French Cooking Class give only distraction, not direction. You are living the life you wanted, but a restless dissatisfaction is … palpable.

You are not suffering with depression and you don’t need a ‘midlife crisis.’

A shifting wind is stirring from an untold direction and you don’t have a map.

Listen.

Eternity is calling the ancient question.
“Who am I?”

Coming to this foreign vista is unsettling. It feels deserted at best, godforsaken at worst.
Good.
That’s how a new journey starts.
You can’t outgrow the Hero’s Journey.
A new chapter is starting.

Only you can turn the page.

How does a story start?

A story never starts, “Twice Upon a Time …” or “Thrice Upon a Time.”

It is only ‘Once’ the lesson is learned, that now we have a story.

AND

Once the lesson is learned, you will never travel that path again.

You can’t unknow what you know.

So …

In the quest of living our own hero’s journey we come full circle. And yet, we are not back to where we started. We have moved forward to start a new story.

Applying the hero’s journey to your life.

Knowing the journeys of past heroes will give insights for our own life.

A study of journeys throughout time, both fact and fiction, reveals a repeated motif of stages and characters. The pattern is named, the hero’s journey.

Bridging these stages and characters to our journey, we gain clarity on foggy days, strength to climb mountains, and direction when we are lost.

Giving you a leg up for your own road ahead, this book, The Quest of Living, is a user friendly guide to the stages and characters along our own hero’s journey.

Stages:

Characters
Hero, Mentor, Threshold Guardian
Enemy, Herald, Shadow
Allies, Shapeshifter, Trickster
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Note: Woven into our life of stages and characters is a deeper level.

Our journey is binary. (Binary: a whole composed of two)

An Outer/Inner Journey –
A daily river of experience is the outer expedition. Clues to our own map can be found in the experiences of others.

The inner journey is the interior expedition of discovering our Self. It is a path that no other person has ever traveled.

This ethereal double helix, a sacred DNA, has connecting rungs not embedded at birth, but derived from the decisions and actions in our daily life.

For those of us in the quest to realize our fullest potential, those decisions and actions take courage.

Poets have penned this choice ‘the road less traveled.’

Why?

Because there is no map.
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Explanations won’t fulfill this quest, only experience.

Learning the hero’s journey is preparation for the experience of our life. Because …

“Once upon a time …” is our story.