We’re all the heroes of our own stories, but the heroes we admire in literature and on the screen find themselves undergoing spiritual and emotional transformations more often than they find themselves using the bathroom. If all of us are heroes, each going on a continuous, limitless, and recursive journey throughout the stages of our lives, then where are you in your journey? How does it relate to your current struggles? What lessons are here for you to learn?
“When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.” -Hans Gruber, Die Hard
Once the journey is over, where are you supposed to go?
You’ve learned the lesson, done your work, and achieved what you set out to accomplish. You’ve climbed the mountain, and yet when you’re standing at the peak you can’t help but wonder: “Now what?”
There’s not really a lot of precedent for you to follow when it comes to coping with achievement. What happens to the main character of the movie after they learn their lesson and the credits roll? We don’t get to see that. The truth of the matter is that our heroes are immediately getting to work on the sequel, where they learn an equally valuable lesson with a higher level of effort and expense.
It’s frustrating, to say the least. We naively assume that because something has finished that it is over. Who’s to say that your journey was complete anyway? Once you have scaled your mountain, perhaps when inspecting the newly unveiled horizon you spot an even taller mountain in the distance. Did you find the call for self-improvement desirable but ultimately resistible? Or are you ready to keep going?
The will to keep going can be challenging to muster. Especially for those of us long resigned to failure, the perils of success can be far more frightening and foreign than the consequences of defeat. You might even feel like an imposter. A secret failure pretending to be successful for as long as you can keep it up. But ultimately, this is just a story that we tell ourselves as an excuse to stop going. It would be simpler for our ego if everything stayed the same, and we never learned anything ever again. Our ego can only become our boss if we promote it from being our employee. We have to keep going.
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
-Laozi
If you are struggling to accept the necessity of repeating the steps of your journey, or just curious about what tools one might need to repeat said steps, then there’s this handy article Your Journey: Repeat about just that. If you are just starting off on the next cycle of your journey, and can’t seem to break out of the way things have always been, then the best place for you to start is probably the beginning with Your Journey: The Way Its Always Been. We’re told that it’s a very good place to start.
The best thing you can do if you’re directionless along your path is to book a counseling session with one of the many talented specialists in our practice!
Sunny Ebsary is a writer and singer-songwriter from Tampa, FL. When he’s not sing-songwriting or just regular writing, he’s probably drinking water with a lot of ice, having a staring contest with his cat, or giving people great ideas. You can listen to Sunny’s music here.
