“The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life & Work

Back to Stage 1. That’s a requirement on replay in all of Stage 2.

Unlike the story arc of the hero’s journey, our real lives do not tend to be isolated adventures. We take on multiple quests and add in some side quests out of habit. Each of these adventures will link back to our origin story. In part 1, I had added in alcoholism as a family dynamic that would impact the choices on my hero’s journey. Later, I had to add in keeping secrets and the arrogance of familial lineage, among other things, to the mix. But these add-ins only showed up when looking backwards became necessary for forward movement.

Going back a bit, I joined the USAF, but why? There’s links to family there. My father was a member of the USMC. He didn’t run around advertising it but it was part of the background noise of the family. Friends of my parents had a son who was in the Navy, and I had a friend who lost her older brother in Vietnam. The military was all around me and generally viewed with respect. I came from a military family tradition, on both my father’s and mother’s sides. I didn’t recognize this at the time, but it definitely shaped my views about my options.

The first section of Stage 2 in the hero’s journey can be referred to as tests, allies, and enemies. In a character arc, this is where we get to see the character grow, find their place in the world and find their tribe. The character will face tests that allow them to pare down the baggage they started the trip with, while adding to their own tale of who they are. They usually grow in confidence at this point because they’re facing tests that they can handle. It would be a very short tale if the main character were to fail the very first test and return home. There is an animated short from my childhood that always reminded me of why the main character in a story usually lives. Here:

George R.R. Martin stood this story line idea on its head with the short-lived Ned Stark as the introduced protagonist in the first book of the Game of Thrones series. In real life, this situation is usually referred to as someone died too young. Beyond these occurrences, most of us survive our initial tests. When we write a character, we focus on one part of a lifetime of journeys. And the best writers manage to have just enough background for the characters to make sense but not so much background that a reader gets lost in details that don’t drive the plot forward.

Real life, on the other hand, is a messy pile of details that clutter up the space but that can’t be cleared away. We keep them all somewhere in the backrooms and liminal spaces of our minds. Which is why I can still remember the look of our garage door after the paint truck rolled down the hill and crashed into it – splashing paint everywhere. I was around 3 and riding a tricycle at the time. The details never seem to go away, they just get shoved to the back of the pile and when we need to explain our choice, we get to dig through them.

Each test, every ally that turns to an enemy, along with the enemies that becomes an allies, is part of the journey. Our real life hopefully lasts much longer than a 3000 page trilogy. Since our stories are so long, we have subplots and smaller arcs that are part of the larger journey. As we get older, our tale becomes not just a tale of adventuring and mountains climbed, but also a tale of personal sacrifice, growth, and courage. We all have our moments of cowardice and failure but they become the details for the future that will make us who we will be later on down the road. When we’ve made it to 60, the ordinary life of our childhood that we left behind so many years ago still echoes, but it has been bedecked and bejeweled by everything that we have seen, done, heard and felt since we took that first step out of our ordinary world.

The other parts of Stage 2, seem to require hindsight to see them. There’s the approach to the biggest trial, also known as the approach to the innermost cave. That’s a hard one to say when that was until one can look back a ways. It fits right there beside, the biggest trial or the darkest hour where the character has a transformational moment and faces death. Personally, I’ve almost died 3 times now. Each one had some transformational qualities. Each one had different transformational qualities. I guess no 2 deaths are alike. Looking back, I can’t say if any of them were darker than the others, but they did all lead me to where I am today. Actual near death is not required for transformations. The birth of a child is a transformative moment. The first time seeing the curvature of the Earth is a transformative moment. The sound of frogs in the channel after being deaf is also transformative.

Stage 2, in books and in life, is all about living. What tests have we faced? Where have we succeeded? Where did we fail? Did we let our fears rule? or did we rule our fear? Within Stage 2 lies the ordeal and also the reward. We need to accept our rewards. We earned them. But rewards lead into Stage 3 and right now it’s time to go back and edit those ordinary world notes before we move on. What has had an impact on our lives that is a surprise now? For me it was a pair of dreams. I had them when I was in elementary school. I still remember them to this day. They kept me from experimenting with hard drugs and from thinking I could buy my way free by sacrificing others. But those are tales for another day. I hope you enjoyed this. Thank you for reading, especially if you made it this far.