World on Fire

The term ‘journey of self-discovery’ refers to travel or pilgrimage undertaken by an individual to understand oneself and attain happiness

Joseph Campbell, who conducted a comparative study of the archetypal hero across world mythologies in a book called ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces,’ found that almost all followed a similar journey of self-discovery and self-actualization.

Now the journey is necessary, and to journey is good. Experience does mold us, and in the quest to find ourselves, the journeys we embark on shape us into new and different people. The self we discover is never the same one we set off to find.

Our current pandemic is similar to a journey. One where there is a passage of evolution that will transform us.

We’ve been conditioned to believe that if we have a problem, to seek a solution we can fix the problem. Our wanting to return to the familiar or ‘normal’ is a way to not engage in our inner discomfort.

Discomfort is part of the process, it causes us to challenge and confront our own fears, and life purpose.

When you acknowledge that you have nothing to lose; you are more inclined to take a risk on something that seems radically innovative. This is not the time to think about the past, but about the person, you want to become.

Our current situation is also an economic and power pandemic. It’s as if the planet were erupting like a volcano giving rise to intense heat. It is a collective experience one in which after the eruption there will be destruction and a display of earth’s power.

This decade, the ’20s remind me of what it must have been like in the 1920s after WWI, It was an era of the highest highs and of the lowest lows, of reaction and progress and innovation. The world stepped into a modern world. Now we may have a blurred wave of innovation under the rubble of illness.

This is a crucial time in history because we are in an election year. I do not pity the nation that has to fight for its rights. I pity the nation that hands them over. I pity the nation that chooses what it has known, so it can have four more years of autocratic domination, that mistakes determinism for fatalism.

Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke has been attributed with the saying: ‘All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.’

There are two versions of our history that future generations might study. One in which a nation was buried in its own slime by having the worse leader in history. And another, in which a government fires on its own people, that sparked a revolution.

If a government fires on its people, the people will revolt. It is time to thrive, not just survive.