We all are such suckers for heroes in life. We grow up secretly believing there is a hero waiting to save us from all our distresses. That’s what we are made to believe, through stories, movies, even history that glorifies the wise, the brave, the hero. We secretly wish to be like them but fall face down as our real struggles are not as attractive or huge as fighting a battle or launching a space rocket or lighting an entire village. But they aren’t easy to deal with either.
Our struggles are nagging, slow with no easy quick fix solutions. Some of our real-life struggles are actually–building a career, dealing with relationships, maintaining good health, coping with loss, overcoming loneliness, being understood, nursing a broken heart etc.
As we grow in our experiences, we become acutely aware that we got to figure this all out ourselves and there is no hero coming to our rescue. We feel ashamed to have waited so long and wasted our lives. We are disheartened, depressed, and stressed.
But for many, this is the exact time of our lives when we wake up to the idea of examining our own beliefs and thoughts. “Like from the bottom of Abyss comes the voice of salvation, it’s during the darkest moment, we truly transform”. We begin to churn out the unrealistic and unnecessary to embrace the realistic and necessary. We strive towards being a hero in our own lives and rise to our unique situations at hand and start trusting in our own capabilities.
Like Frank Kafka said– Man cannot live without a permanent trust in something indestructible within himself, though both the indestructible something and his own trust in it may remain concealed from him (till he starts seeking it).
The little voice within us, if we care to listen and trust, is always cheering us up, completely believing that the hero we are waiting for is us! Like everything else in life, our hero journey too starts with “I”.
Unlike the split-second, Death-defying, big front-page heroic acts that impresses the mass, when we devote our life to an altruistic purpose and dedicate a significant amount of focus to that specific cause, religiously, it becomes a Hero Journey too. Though this type of Heroism goes under appreciated all the time, as it had no frills & fancies attached, It is this journey of ordinary individuals finding strength to preserve and endure despite overwhelming obstacles, that never fails to inspire us to believe in our own potential to become the hero we always wanted in our lives.
