The leap of faith
There comes a point in many people's lives where we have to trust that we have the stuff of heroes in us.
Perhaps it sounds silly or arrogant to think of ourselves as heroes. It's not as if we're fighting dragons. But we are fighting to overcome challenges and that is the hero’s journey. We can recognise some of the archetypes like the threshold guardian that guards bottlenecks through which we have to pass to continue the journey. Perhaps we're lucky enough to have a mentor who helps us understand the journey and gives us gifts to aid us on the journey.
If we look at different stages of the hero's journey, it becomes easier to make the connection to our own lives. We can recognise the stage of meeting the mentor or the first encounter with a threshold guardian where our initial commitment to the journey is challenged. But the greatest may be accepting the call to adventure. Deciding that something needs to change is one thing, but actually doing it is really challenging. It's the leap of faith. We don't know where the next step will take us. We may stumble or even fall and that's scary, even terrifying. Who wants to get hurt? So it becomes easy to stay where we are.
Leap over the edge by Craig Stevens Fuji XF10 F9 ISO 400
This is why we sometimes see the stage of refusal of the call. Luke Skywalker turns Obi-Wan Kenobi down and tries to go home because he's got to get the crops in. But the journey is always there, inside us, demanding to be taken.
It's moving to London that I see as my biggest leap of faith because I wasn't as developed as I am now and because I hadn't been diagnosed as autistic then, so I was lacking self-knowledge. But the journey was still there to be taken. That became a formative experience. In recent years, perhaps the home camp has looked more appealing than ever, offering safety as it does, but the needs we have to strike out into terra incognita are still there.
The leap of faith is a scary thing to do, but we do it because what we have or where we are now isn't sufficient. We know that something is missing and that we can only find it out there, beyond the cone of light cast by the camp fire.