There is something in everyone of you that waits and listens for the sound of the genuine in yourself. It is the only true guide you will ever have. and if you cannot hear it, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls -Howard Thurman
I’ve been reading a lot as of late. It helps me listen for the genuine. I have had books and books that i have meant to start reading. so i started. it keeps me sort of keen on the world we live in, because the brilliant and beautiful words of all these humans came out of it…
J.R.R. Tolkien, who i consider a brilliant mind speaks through his character Gandalf the Grey when he explains to Frodo, who undertakes one of the most well known and loved quests in literature, the difference between an adventure and a quest. He says that an adventure is a “there-and back again” affair.
One underatkes an adventure as a matter of one’s own desire-often from bordem and a lust for excitment. Once the treasure is found and the adventure is over, one returns essentially unchanged by the experience.
An escapist culture like the one we live in today lives for adventures. i live for adventures.
A quest, by contrast, is never a matter of one’s desire but rather of one’s calling. It concerns how we shall travel the road and whether we know or not if we shall complete our errand.
I used to waver at the thought of everyone having a calling in life. it became too much for me to try and live up to a calling. i hadn’t asked for a quest (or did i?). and adventures seemed right by me. by rendering this escape of the mind i was living a dream! Howard Thurman is also known to have said, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go do it, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Adventures made me feel alive.
But Cobb (DiCaprio, who like wine is getting better with age) from the summer blockbuster flick, Inception says,
“Dreams feel real while we’re in them. It’s only when we wake up that we realize something was actually strange.”
As I thought of that I realized that although i lived for adventures, there were important pieces of my life that I ignored that weren’t apart of the dream life i was living. i was living a dream, but hadn’t brought that back to my real life. i was not happy.
and now those issues i ignored have caught up to me in real life. dealing with real life sucks. but so does never dreaming for fear of having to wake up. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think that escapism into adventures is fundamentally and exclusively negative. Adventures should be a part of a balanced life, and i don’t take back any of the adventures i’ve had.
J.R.R. Tolkien even said in his essay “On Fairy-Stories”, that escapism had an element of emancipation in its attempt to figure a different reality. His friend C. S. Lewis who also fancied escapism was fond of remarking that the usual enemies of escape were jailers.
With all that being said, I am now naturally on a quest to find my quest…
a quest that makes me feel alive all the time.
and what better quest would a beginner like me find than trying to find the genuine in me?
Still..to deny the constant nearness of adventure (or death as Tolkien would say) would be a supreme folly. So I do invite every hung-up person in the whole wide universe to gaze upon the chimes of freedom flashing. and bring me that horizon. hope you’re all there to join me. i’m thinking of heading south westerly? ..we shall see..
love haeree.
Haeree Kim's Blog 