T.S. Eliot called them them “hollow men,” the men – and in our time, the women – who are uneasy in their lives, but who succumbed to a life of fear and surrender. In myth, they are the men and women who refused the call to adventure and thus, in many ways did not have a life. Sometimes they die, mostly they simply disappeared, vanishing into the conventional wisdom of the mob, or became disappointed non-entities, even to themselves. I see myself in this, in that I almost gave my life away to fear and the culture of fear around me.
Every day, we are asked if we wish to answer the call to adventure. Do we pursue our hearts? Follow our dreams? Do we flush away our hopes for our work, surrender to the anxiety, the cult of warnings and obligation that we are continuously told is what we need? I call this the flight from risk. In the call to adventure, there is always risk. Do we live for health care? The longest possible life? Retirement and security? Economists and politicians notions of economy and efficiency?
This, I think, is the choice for me, and I have to make it every day. It is the basic story of the hero’s journey. Giving up where we are, going into the realm of adventure, coming to some kind of symbolically rendered realization, and then struggling to return to the field of normal life. This is not what we are told to do, for all of our lives. Not in school. Not by doctors. Not by financial advisers, or usually, by friends and family. Is comes from within. I do not wish to be a hollow man.