Joseph Campbell wrote that most people are either security or mythically driven. Security conscious people make deliberate choices about their life. They have money saved, jog and exercise, are prepared for recessions, retirement, illness and beyond.
Mythically driven people are different, and they make different choices. They take risks, and make deliberate decisions that the choices they make may not result in security as most Americans define it – money in the bank, fat IRA’s, mortgages paid off. I am a mythically driven person, and I am soon to marry another, an artist. I decided when I came to the farm that my life would not be about security, and that I was unlikely ever to have the right amount of money saved up. I have never been able to get myself to jog or ride an exercycle, although I am very active on the farm and eat nothing but good and organic stuff.
I will perhaps not know in my lifetime if my choices were the right ones. Some of my friends and other people I am close to have avoided my kind of life, saved like squirrels, made very different choices about security. They have downsized, their bank accounts are full, and they have shed much of the detritus of life.
Campbell says mythicall driven people risk everything for their dreams. I guess I am one of those. I made my choices, and while I will never be rich or probably even secure, I have no regrets. I chose freedom, challenge, work and love. To the end.
I am not arrogant enough to know that my choices were the right ones, only that I do not regret having made them. A farm with animals is not a sane place to live, and a writer’s life is never secure. But ever since I made my choices, I have been challenged, and driven to pursue my dreams. I told Maria this week that I am just not one of the straight people living a straight life. I’m not proud of it, nor am I ashamed. It’s just who I have figured out I am. It seems to me that security conscious people are reassessing their ideas about what makes one secure. It is not, I think, money, markets or IRA’s.
The truly creative mind is abnormal. He or she has the overpowering necessity to create, create, create. He is not really alive unless he is creating. That is my signal to the world, I guess, and I remind myself of it every time I start envying those people who took the other path.
