(After a rather long layoff from my memoir book chapters I’ve finally put up the next chapter here. I feel like I have significant editing to do to these chapters but they’re out for a purpose, though I’m not quite sure in myself what that purpose is, yet.)
“We’re just plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things. Make you late for dinner. I can’t think what anybody sees in them.”
Bilbo Baggins
In the previous chapter I said that some people will ignore the Call or downright refuse to hear it. Why might anyone refuse a call to adventure? Especially if that adventure might lead to something wonderful?
Because adventures are unpredictable and that means that at least part of the
time, more often most of the time, we (our egos) are not in control of what’s going on. While we might like a little bit of spice and excitement in our lives, we still want to feel that we’re in control of, at the minimum, all crucial aspects. A refusal of adventure reflects the fear of the ego that it will lose control of things.
Egos take a long time to learn, if they ever do, that they’re not really in control of anything anyway. The only thing they have any degree of control over is whether or not they’ll release their illusion of control. For an ego bound by this fear of loss of control there is no such thing as “something wonderful” unless it’s a guaranteed pleasant result. By its very nature such a guarantee removes some of the wonderfulness. It’s the surprise, the marvel of encountering something unknown or unexpected, even if it’s difficult, that makes an adventure “wonder full.”
The ego doesn’t see any contribution to its self-interest by having an 
adventure. Adventure will make you late for dinner. It will probably keep you apart from your loved ones in one way or another, at least for a while. It may very well be frightening. It will almost definitely, at the minimum, make you uncomfortable (if not cause actual pain) at some point or other. It might even be dangerous. The ego definitely doesn’t like to be uncomfortable for very long. Being uncomfortable or in pain emphasizes the ego’s mortality and it doesn’t want to think about that.
Paradoxically, busyness, even to the point of severe pain and distress, can allow the ego to avoid thinking about its impermanence. Staying within its “comfort zone” allows it to convince itself that nothing will ever change and that it will continue to exist indefinitely.
By this refusal to grow the ego actually sounds its own death knell. The term we use to indicate the absence of change or growth is death and yet the ego is blind to this reality. Without growth the only option is for the bud to rot on the stem. Stockpiling more money and things and status and living a long time doesn’t equate to growth.
This refusal isn’t always a conscious and deliberate choice – most often it’s not – but is generally a result of being deeply invested in the trappings of material success as a measure of who we are. If we think that what we do and what we have and even what and how well we think is what makes us who we are, then we get attached to our possessions and abilities. When that happens, our
belongings and aptitudes begin to rule our lives. They make us decide how we’ll live to protect them rather than decide how we’ll use them to live. All of our efforts go into keeping what we have, making sure it doesn’t get taken away from us, and trying to get more. If we lose any of that paraphernalia, who will we become? Maybe a bag lady? Horrors!
But what’s really important? What gives meaning to our lives? Is it our things? Is it what we do? Is it how we live, how we behave? I don’t have to tell you the answers. But we can avoid finding the answers to these questions by getting involved in busyness in an effort to distract our thoughts from them or in trying to amass distractions such as status and possessions.
What we’re really avoiding, though, is the answer to only one question: Who 
am I? When we begin the Journey engendered by that question we begin the journey to wisdom. This Journey isn’t very straightforward, though it might seem so at first. It will lead us into a labyrinth in which it is first necessary to become lost, to lose our selves so we can find our Selves.
The ego finds it very difficult to trust that, just as a sparrow or a lily of the field, it will always have its needs taken care of. I know, I know, there really are bag ladies and homeless people, and cats catch sparrows, and lilies wilt and die, but maybe our needs are different than we think they are. They can certainly be very different than what our egos think they are.
The ego trusts only what it can accumulate for itself to keep it as comfortable, as safe and secure as possible. This attitude can lead the ego all unknowingly into behaviors and activities that are actually antithetical to its desires. Like me, laboring under the illusion of control by “doing all the right things,” adding more and more until I was juggling way too many of them and my life was out of control.
My egoic anxiety about my group health insurance was a legitimate concern but I made my decision about that on the basis of a vague and illegitimate fear, not on the reality of the situation. That anxiety led me to live life with an eye to the distant future and to commit to actions that simply led me to more and more commitments until I was so over-committed that I should have been committed.
I was so involved in the process and in concern for my future that I didn’t even notice how unlivable it was making my life in the present. It didn’t occur to me until nearly too late that if I continued living that way I might not have a future in which I’d need health care.
Unlike our egos, our Authentic Self is immortal and, having all the time imaginable, it’s only too happy to go slowly and savor life’s various events as well as desiring a variety of experiences. This doesn’t mean to just take 
vacations in exotic places, though that can be a part of it. It simply means to notice where we are right now, the small things in our lives, like birds at a feeder or the color of the new grass in spring or the bubbles in the dishwater as they create miniature prisms for the sunlight coming through the window.
By being aware of these small glories and making a conscious decision to share them with our Higher Self (termed by my friend Alice as our Divine Guest) we become more open to the wonders of the real world as well as satisfying our soul at the deepest level. My ten years in the navy reserve saw me with assignments on all three coasts at one time or another and, stress aside, I generally enjoyed them even when they were very demanding, so maybe my Authentic Self got something out of those experiences. I hope so. I (ego) paid a dear price for them, though I can’t say I’m sorry for them.
Most of all, though, the Self wants and needs encounters that help it grow in wisdom. While I wouldn’t say that all my busyness was the best way to go about learning wisdom, it certainly did teach me that it was a most difficult way to begin that learning. Maybe it took all of this busyness and exhaustion to wear down my ego defenses, to break through my popcorn shell, so that I could finally have the opportunity to expand and learn.
(End Part One)
probably most, like me, won’t recognize it. Many will think it’s simply another problem or perhaps a more or less severe or serious illness or just one more thing piled on. Not everyone will need the intensity of insistence that my Soul expressed in order to get my recalcitrant ego to respond.
Even when my ego did finally acquiesce, it still didn’t know to what it had yielded or why. It only knew that it had reached the end of its rope and couldn’t hold on any longer. It had no idea what would happen when it let go, but let go it must.
full well that the outcomes will not always be exactly what we envision but we expect that they’ll be close enough to be acceptable and we’ll adapt. Tolerable risk and uncertainty is what makes them the kind of adventures we tend to expect from life. The key word here is “tolerable.” The Hero’s Journey will most likely change your notion of adaptability and tolerable.
It will probably come upon us when we think we’ve finally got things fairly well figured out, when life doesn’t seem to be coming at us quite so quickly anymore and we’re looking forward to resting on our laurels for a while. There is nothing fixed about the timing, though; we can hear the Call at any stage of life.
Search for Soul 