Dreams of a heroic call to adventure

The dramatic call to adventure can be a tantalising fantasy. What better way to mentally escape the drudgery of our apparently boring, everyday lives? Or to dull the pain of a past or ongoing emotional trauma? 

We look at characters in stories and daydream about something happening to us like that. Something external reaching into our lives and pulling us out of the wet, grey cement we’re stuck in or the searing flames we’re surrounded by. Peter Parker is bitten by a radio-active spider and develops amazing supernatural powers. Harry Potter is repeatedly told by the world and everyone in it that he is special and important. In the Matrix, strangers crash into Neo’s life and tell him he is ‘the One’ - capable of near unlimited abilities and destined for the utmost importance; the liberation of the human race.

What we often don’t notice though, is that our minds are cherry-picking these stories and character arcs. We are often selecting the best bits to fuel our dreams and ignoring the obligatory trials that accompany such events. The call to adventure - the realisation that you are special or capable of great things almost never appears to us as good news at the time.

Our default imagining of these life changing events is as something out of the ordinary, but positive. We picture getting something spectacular for free; super-human powers and/or a sense of great importance in the world. But what really happens in these moments of change is an incredible amount of pain. 

Harry Potter’s celebrity was garnered in the same traumatic moment he lost his parents. It is forever linked to the pain of growing up without them. What’s more, this celebrated status has nothing to do with him as a person. His survival is not due to any special ability or talent of his. Harry has to live with a sense of destiny and the expectations of others constantly weighing on him, without feeling remotely equipped to deal or deliver. Peter Parker also lost his uncle - who was his foster father - around the same time he gained his powers. And in gaining these powers, he felt an overwhelming responsibility to use them to serve people, which meant sacrificing his own wants and desires. Neo suffered existential dread when he was first confronted with the reality of the world. He had such a hard time accepting the shift in his core beliefs that he vomited and passed out.

I’m sure early in his journey, Harry would have sacrificed his ‘special’ status and importance for the love of his parents. It’s self-evident that Peter would have preferred his uncle still be alive than to be able to do all the phenomenal things he can do post spider-bite. And even though it’s not explicitly stated, one can extrapolate from Neo’s severe reaction to what Morpheus tells him, that for at least a moment, he wishes he could go back to not knowing the truth - to being ‘blissfully ignorant’.

We often wish for a life changing event like in the examples of the above characters, thinking that it would rescue us from our suffering, whatever it may be. But these moments we lust after -  when looked at as they are and not through the pinky hue of rose-coloured glasses - are all harrowing. They usually bring suffering, not dispel it.

Being special, even if it’s in the heroic way we see in movies, is painful. And at the time, it will almost certainly seem to us like bad news.

Those powers that Peter Parker gets do come with great responsibility, as does Harry Potter’s destined significance. And no sooner has Neo realised his potent potential, then his enemies morph to match as we see in subsequent films.  Life adjusts its difficulty to your level. If life seems really hard, then that’s because you’re either stronger than you think or you’re about to become stronger. As you become stronger and more powerful, so do the challenges you face in life. Life scales.

So if you’re suffering or going through the motions of your seemingly mundane, monotonous life and you wish that you’d win the lottery or discover a crashed meteor and suddenly gain telekinetic powers - remember that it never looks like good news in the moment. You cannot fire an arrow without first drawing it back. So too, no leap forward is made in life without the accompanying suffering. And conversely, if you’re suffering right now, know that you are laying the foundations that are required before moving to the next level. 

This is not a recommendation to avoid daydreaming or wishing for changes, but rather to acknowledge the trials that accompany them. And perhaps even to recognise the ones that may already be coming true for us, but which we are unable recognise yet in their current adversarial disguise.