ADVENTURE IS AN INNER JOURNEY

Stuart Kerslake

“Our individual thoughts are not, as we think, the deep, but only the foam upon the deep.” – W.B. Yeats.

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, as a noun, the word Adventure means “An unusual and exciting or daring experience”, and as a verb, it means to “Engage in daring or risky activity”.

But interestingly, Adventure has two Latin derivatives: “Adventurus”, “About to happen’; and “Advenire”, ‘Arrive’”. As well as the anticipation (“about to happen”) of the “unusual, exciting, daring experience”, there’s also a sense of arrival – a “setting out” and an “arriving”, if you will. So you could say that an adventure is circular in nature.

Circles are seen as powerful symbols in virtually every culture we know, past and present. They contain the wholeness of things, as well as being “endless” along their circumference. This Hero’s Journey is the root of every great story, be it oral, written or visual (like a film or TV show), and it’s often depicted as a circle, broken into two “worlds”, the Ordinary or Everyday, and the Special, the domains of the Known and the Unknown respectively.

This is often overlaid with three segments, Departure, Initiation and Return, such that the Departure and Return occur in the Everyday/ Known world, whilst the Initiation occurs in the Special/Unknown world.

Joseph Campbell was a lifelong student of mythology and symbology, and perhaps his most powerful thesis is that there is one overarching “mono-myth” underpinning every myth, which is also a beautiful metaphor for the journey each of us takes (potentially This is not intended as a treatise on the Hero’s Journey, but as an analogy, imagine Neo from “The Matrix”, suddenly awakening from his “sleep” and choosing the Red Pill, to be literally unplugged from the ordinary world, and immersed into the extraordinary one