Steven Pressfield's Blog, page 15

Wilderness = Metaphor

The psychic geography of a wilderness passage goes something like this:

Our dream/calling/true self is percolating inside us. We sense this on some unconscious level and it scares the crap out of us. We don’t want to face it. So we deny it, suppress it, push it deeper into the shadows.

But our dream/calling/true self will not be dismissed so easily. It finds a path to daylight, perhaps in the form of “acting out” in the psychiatric sense, i.e. bursting forth as a negative—an addiction, a breakup, a wild-and-crazy stunt that gets us ejected from our Ordinary World.

The Carina Nebula, from the James Webb space telescope

Here’s where the metaphor comes in.

The wilderness passage that we find ourselves on—for me it was blue-collar jobs in far-flung corners of the country—is a metaphor for our dream/calling/true self. It is that Self manifesting as a crypto- or shadow version of itself.

The drama-queen life we find ourselves living is a sublimated form of the drama we’d like to produce in the theater or dance or literature.

The addiction that consumes us is a shadow version of the passion we really should be putting into a new startup or a non-profit philanthropic venture or simply the love that we fear to expose to others or to accept from them.

Pick your affliction–sex, food, booze, drugs, abuse of self or others, depression, alienation, political extremism, physical or emotional violence. (Granted, such conditions can be truly clinical … I don’t mean to play psychiatrist here). But, to repeat, pick your Wilderness. If we examine it as a metaphor, we will find, hiding in plain sight, the authentic dream/calling/self that we have been so terrified to bring forth into material being.

A Wilderness Passage reaches its climax and culmination, as Odysseus’s did, with a “return home”—meaning a moment, brought about by our own exhaustion with our ordeal, when we can no longer remain in denial of the True Self that has been trying so hard to be born from the wreckage of our flight from it.

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The Wilderness Story is all stories

You and I may think, in the depths of our Wilderness Passage, that the ordeal we’re undergoing is unique. And it is, in the sense that our passage is ours alone; no one else has ever, or will ever, go through the same initiation.

But in a far deeper sense, all Wilderness passages are the same. The Wilderness Story is all stories.

Every book, every movie, every legend, every myth is a wilderness story. They are all about a character or group of characters who are estranged or cast out from some aspect of their deeper selves.

The Christ story is a wilderness story. It even has Jesus literally in the wilderness, being tempted by the devil. Buddha’s story is a wilderness story. Muhammad’s. Krishna’s. Pick any spiritual saga or myth. At bottom, they’re all wilderness stories.

Every vision quest is a wilderness story. Every legend, every myth. The Odyssey, the story of King Arthur, of Theseus, of Siegfried, of Buffalo Wallow Woman.

Brad Pitt in “World War Z”

Every Western is a wilderness story, every love story, every gangster saga, every Zombie Apocalypse. 

War and Peace is a wilderness story. As is Beloved, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Augie March.

The Godfather (at least I and II) is a wilderness story. So is Top Gun (both versions) and Chinatown and Casablanca and The Wild Bunch and Alien and Avatar (both versions.). 

Songs and albums. Hotel California is a wilderness story, along with Revolver and Pet Sounds and Beggars Banquet, not to mention Fight the Power, Straight Outta Compton and Mind Playing Tricks on Me.

The point I’m trying to make is that if you and I are in the midst of a wilderness passage, painful as it may be, it may help us to remember that we are living out a universal passage that humankind has been enacting for hundreds of thousands of years.

Every story is a wilderness story.

P.S. My story of my own passage through the wilderness—GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir—was just published a few days ago (in hardback, eBook, and audiobook), 1/30 to be exact. Signed first editions can still be ordered at www.stevenpressfield.com.

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The Wilderness Passage is Not Optional

You can catch the ride early or catch it late. But, like it or not, you were born with your ticket. Sooner or later, the conductor will call, “All Aboard!” and the train—with you on it—will pull out of the station.

William Holden and the train from “The Wild Bunch”

The weird thing about a Wilderness Passage is we can try to duck it … and even succeed—except what happens is the very act of dodging becomes its own Wilderness Passage and, despite all our efforts, our destiny has caught up with us and we have to face it.

I have a friend who’s an entertainment lawyer in Hollywood. The law is his shadow career and he knows it. He should be writing or producing movies … or books … or working in some whole new medium of expression. But he’s not. He keeps putting that day off. 

It won’t surprise you, I’m sure, when I report that my friend’s formerly social drinking has taken a more dangerous turn. He’s also dressing differently. I don’t know what to call his new style but it’s definitely not “L.A. Law.”

In other words, my friend is slip-sliding from one wilderness (for him)—the law—into another of self-destruction (or, perhaps more positively, self-redefinition.)

What is he seeking? Like me, I suspect, he is unconsciously navigating toward an All is Lost Moment—some horrible crash-and-burn calamity whose ultimate outcome will be, I hope, his making the decision to commit to whatever his heart is really calling him to.

This is a long way of saying that the Wilderness Passage is not optional.

We may think we can duck and dodge it, and we may actually succeed for years. But sooner or later, our unlived life will catch up to us.

P.S. The story of my own passage through the wilderness—GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir—was just published a few days ago (in hardback, eBook, and audiobook), 12/30 to be exact. Signed first editions can still be ordered at www.stevenpressfield.com.

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SUPPLY CHAIN ISSUES

We were supposed to get 500 hardbacks of my new book, GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir, on 12/1/22 to sign and ship to readers who had preordered. Guess what? The books are sitting on a truck in Simi Valley, California today, 1/4/23.

But no worries, brothers and sisters! See the links below to order the (unsigned) hardback, the eBook, or the audiobook. You can order a signed First Edition hardback as well. I’ll sign it and send it as soon as we can get it off that truck.

Happy New Year!

We’ll get ’em off, I promise!!SIGNED HARDBACKSE-BOOKAUDIOBOOKUNSIGNED HARDBACKS

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Wilderness in a Corner Office

You can have a great career, a loving spouse and family, the respect and envy of all who know you … and still be in the Wilderness.

You’re in the Wilderness if this career/family/respect is for a calling that is not yours, that doesn’t arise from your truest self.

William Holden in “Executive Suite”

In a way, this is the most excruciating form of Wilderness because you’re in hell and you know it, yet you get no sympathy for your suffering, even from yourself. In fact, if you dare to express your misery (even to yourself), you are looked at as an ingrate, a cream puff, a weenie.

You’re not. Your wilderness is real. Your suffering is real. And your peril is real.

My friend Garrett Smith sent me following from the podcast, This Jungian Life. It’s from an interview with Matthew Quick, the writer of the novel, Silver Linings Playbook:

“A lot of people said, ‘Wow, that’s so brave of you to [walk away from a career to write]’…. But I don’t see it as an act of bravery so much as a last ditch effort to save myself.  Because if I wasn’t in so much pain walking into that building every day to teach, I would have easily done my 20 years and I would have been retired by now.  But I couldn’t walk into that building anymore, I was in so much pain and suffering that I had to do this, it wasn’t an option, I was going to go to a very bad place if I didn’t change my life in a radical way.”

A case could be made that the short stories of John Cheever (and to a lesser extent those of John Updike) are tales of the Wilderness in a Corner Office. They’re about the crazy stuff that seemingly successful people are driven to by the unlived Calling within them.

We could make an equally valid case, I suspect, that the profession of psychotherapy is simply a response to the internal crises produced by Wilderness in a Corner Office. And the challenges faced and insights gained in therapy are their own passage through the Wilderness, their own seeking of a way “back home.”

The bad news is: a Wilderness Passage is mandatory. You can’t hide from it, even in the upper echelons of material success.

The good news is: a Wilderness Passage is mandatory. The Big Choice will be set before us, no matter how hard we try to hide from it.

The goddess, it would seem, plays for keeps. 

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Wilderness = Resistance

What are we running from when we find ourselves in the Wilderness?

We’re running from ourselves.

What’s really going on in any Wilderness Passage is that, at the level of the soul, some primal change has initiated itself. Our true identity/calling/vocation/gift has begun to stir within us. 

This immediately evokes Resistance.

The more profound the change stirring inside us, the more monumental (and the more diabolical) will be the Resistance we feel.

Resistance’s sole intent is to STOP that positive evolution.

Resistance will try to blow up that evolution. It will distract, undermine, incite terror, passivity, confusion. When such measures fail, Resistance will seek to make us “act out” in the sense that psychologists use this term, i.e. to self-destruct by taking some extravagant material action—infidelity, drug or alcohol drama, quitting a job, even getting ourselves arrested and thrown in jail. 

In my case, when I was driving trucks, working in the oilfields, serving as an attendant in a mental hospital, etc., what was really happening was I was running away from writing. What was really happening was my own Resistance was kicking my ass.

At the time, of course, I had no idea there even was such a thing as Resistance. I was at the mercy of my own compulsion to self-sabotage. 

In the story of Jonah in the Bible, God commands Jonah to travel to Nineveh, a city of wickedness, and there preach against that evil. But Jonah is afraid. He doesn’t want to go. So he catches a ship bound in the opposite direction, to Tarshish.

Ancient Nineveh, capital of the Assyrian Empire

We all know how that worked out.

Jonah carries such bad juju from his decision to flee from heaven’s call that this force conjures a great storm. The ship he’s on is soon at the point of foundering. In desperation, the sailors chuck Jonah overboard (which immediately calms the storm), whereupon Jonah, bobbing around in the ocean, gets swallowed by a whale. Jonah spends three days in the whale’s belly, calling out to God to forgive him and save him. Sure enough, the whale coughs Jonah up onto dry land, ready to carry on.

God’s word is our soul calling to us to its true identity. Resistance is the fear that makes us flee this call. The wilderness is our time in the belly of the whale.

In other words, the purpose of our sojourn in the wilderness is to scare the crap out of us and make us face the fear that up till then had been kicking our butt.

The Jonah who is vomited up by the whale is not the same Jonah who originally fled from his calling. He has been chastened by his ordeal. The problem, Jonah realizes, is not the assignment from heaven. It’s not the obstacles he must face if he accepts his mission.

The problem is our own fear, i.e. Resistance … our own tendency to self-doubt, self-sabotage, self-destruction. Before we can do anything—anything at all—we must become aware of this reality and formulate some kind of program or plan to face it and overcome it.

My new memoir, Govt Cheese (pub date 12/30, available for pre-order now), is about my time in the belly of the whale. The beats of my story might not match those of yours, but they will for sure parallel them metaphorically. Why? Because the Jonah Story is universal. Male or female, rich or poor, young or old, we’re all at some point going to catch that ship for Tarshish … and we’re all going to wind up you-know-where.

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The Wilderness Passage is Enacted in a Benighted State

We on our wilderness passage are blind. We’re acting out. We’re clueless.

I know I was.

I had no idea I was even in the wilderness, let alone that it was a passage. All I knew was that I was on a train and, no matter what I tried or how hard I tried it, I couldn’t get off.

This is as it should be.

“Now the word of the Lord came unto Jonah, saying, ‘Arise, go to Nineveh, and cry against it. But Jonah rose up to flee from the presence of the Lord … “

Consider the parameters of a Wilderness Passage.

The reason it starts for you and me is because we, in our ignorance, have pushed ourselves so far away from where we should be that the rubber band has snapped. Our own “life” (very definitely in quotation marks) has ejected us. We have blown up our marriage, lost our job, gotten sent to jail. Our own life has cast us out into the void.

By definition we are clueless.

By definition we are in denial.

If we weren’t in denial of who we really are, we wouldn’t have been kicked out into the wilderness in the first place.

In a way, this blog post and everything else I or anyone else mighty seek to communicate on this subject is wasted breath. The man or woman in the midst of their passage can’t hear us. 

Again, this is as it should be.

The mouse in the maze has no choice but to bang head-first into all the walls. That’s how she learns.

And yet, as we said a few posts ago, we are not alone in this labyrinth. A goddess is with us. My old friend John McCown had a great metaphor for this. He said the goddess taps us first with a feather. When that doesn’t work, she swats us with a nerf bat. Then her bare hand, pow, across the face. 

When that still makes no dent, she gets out the two-by-four and plants it full-force right between our eyes.

We wake up face-down in the gutter with an empty bottle of Jack Daniels beside us. “Oh? Really? I guess I DO have a drinking problem.”

In other words, the state of benightedness in which we pass through the wilderness is our own doing. Like Jonah in the Bible, we are in deliberate flight from that person, that calling, that gift that we know is us, is our truest and best self. We’re in flight for the same reason everyone is. Because it’s freakin’ SCARY to live out that person/life/gift!

Our passage through the wilderness will continue in blindness until we come face-to-face with something (whatever that Something may be) that is even scarier than being or becoming who were were meant to be—and who we have been all along.

P.S. My story of my own passage through the wilderness—GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir—became available for preorder on 12/6. Pub date: 12/30. Signed first edition hardbacks can be pre-ordered at www.stevenpressfield.com.

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Navigating without the stars

If you’ve ever studied land or celestial navigation, you know that both systems are based on reference points. From our frigate HMS Surprise off the coast of Patagonia, if we take a compass bearing on that headland off Rio Gallegos and another on the summit of Cerro Norte and scribe them both on a nautical chart, where the lines intersect is our position.

Russell Crowe in Patrick O’Brian’s “Master and Commander”

We now know where we are.

You and I do the same thing every morning as we surface from sleep. “Ah, there’s my spouse next to me in bed … clock says 6:47 … dog is snoring on the carpet. Bathrobe. Slippers. Email …” 

Each is a reference point. Each assures us that the Earth hasn’t spun off its axis during the night; we’re still alive and sane; life goes on in a manner with which we’re familiar.

A period “in the wilderness,” on the other hand, is by definition a passage without reference points. 

Here’s a paragraph from my new memoir, Govt Cheese:

I wake up in my van. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who I am. The reality of my existence is that my identity, if I ever had one, has dissolved. Goals. Do I have any? I can’t even conceive of the possibility. A purpose? To survive until tomorrow. I open the van’s side doors. It’s warm. I’m in a dirt turnout at the edge of a farmer’s field. Corn. Oh yeah, I’m in Iowa. Where, I have no clue. It takes me a moment to remember where I’m going. East? West? Where am I coming from? 

Goals and a purpose are reference points too. They ground us. “Oh yeah, I’m doing this so I can get into Harvard!”

But in the wilderness, we don’t have those reference points. We are free-floating. We’re unmoored, unhinged, untethered.

And yet …

And yet, in many ways, the reason we have bungled or self-destructed or self-ejected our way into the wilderness, whether we realize it or not, is to blow up all points of reference.

We want to be lost.

We want to be cut free.

Why?

Because something was rotten in our prior state of Denmark. Our old reference points had led us to a dead end, a place of desperation (again, whether we realize this or not.) So we blow them up. We commit some crime/faux pas/outrage. We tell our boss to take this job and shove it. We bolt from our marriage. We join the Foreign Legion.

We leave the Ordinary World and step through the looking glass into the Inverted World. In this world, hatters are mad and every birthday is an Un-birthday.

It’s no fun to live without reference points. It’s hell. We wouldn’t wish it on our worst enemy. And yet, now that we’re here, there’s something exhilarating about the sheer formlessness and open-possibility-ness of everything. 

We are free now to find new reference points. And with luck to locate our position on the chart in a place that we never knew existed but that is true, at last, to who we really are.

P.S. My story of my own passage through the wilderness—GOVT CHEESE: A Memoir—becomes available for preorder today! Pub date: 12/30. Signed first edition hardbacks can be pre-ordered right now at www.stevenpressfield.com.

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The Shadow in the Wilderness

Last week we talked about our passage “through the wilderness” being imbued with meaning, i.e. not random, not absurd, not shameful, not meaningless.

Let’s dive into this a little deeper.

In Turning Pro, I wrote about “shadow careers.”

Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead.  The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career.  

Are you getting your Ph.D. in Elizabethan Studies because you’re afraid to write the tragedies and comedies you know you have inside you?  Are you living the drugs-and-booze half of the musician’s life, without actually writing the music?  Are you working in a support capacity for an innovator because you’re afraid to risk being an innovator yourself?

If you’re dissatisfied with your current life, ask yourself what your current life is a metaphor for.

That metaphor will point you toward your true calling.

“The wilderness” is a shadow calling.

The reason our lost years are loaded with meaning is because they’re a metaphor. It’s not random that one person becomes addicted (nor is it random, what they become addicted to), while another abuses his spouse and children. Hidden in each shadow is the Dream. Hidden is who the Dreamer truly is, what his or her true calling really is.

My wilderness/shadow was driving over the road—trucks, cars, whatever wheel I could get behind. Driving for me was mileage. Numbers on an odometer. 

The (fake) idea that I was getting somewhere.

Ambition was my secret. I wanted to make something of myself. But I was too terrified to even realize it. So unconsciously I found a windshield to stare through and an accelerator to plant my foot on. 

The metaphor for me was mileage. It was delivering a load.

Trucks for me was the metaphor. Because with trucks it wasn’t just driving, it was delivering a load. People were waiting for me. They wanted what I was bringing. They were happy when they saw my headlights come around the corner.

I had no sense of this “in the wilderness.” No clue. We’re blind to the meaning in the moment. We’re addicted. We’re not just imprisoned, we’re self-imprisoned. But the meaning is right there, staring us in the face.

I have a friend who’s an addiction counselor. The first time we went out to breakfast, he leaned across the table and looked me deep in the eye. “Are you sober?” he asked. 

That was tremendously perceptive.

My friend saw the shadow in me. It isn’t alcohol, it’s self-sabotage. It’s Resistance. 

That’s the wilderness for me. The only difference between me at twenty-eight driving over the road and me now is I see it now.

The meaning was there all along. It just took me a passage through the wilderness to see it. 

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Wilderness = Hero’s Journey

Why do we view our ordeals “in the wilderness,” in hindsight, in such a positive light? Why do people make such statements as, “It made me who I am today,” or “Excruciating as it was in the moment, I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”

I think it’s because this passage is our hero’s journey, in the best and most positive sense.

What is “the hero’s journey,” anyway? 

Denzel Washington in “The Book of Eli”

According to Joseph Campbell (not to mention Carl Jung), the hero’s journey is a universal rite of passage that most, if not all, human souls must undergo in real life. Jung called it a passage to “individuation”—to becoming who we really are.

Our ordeals “in the wilderness” are exactly that. 

Consider the beats of the hero’s journey, as Campbell and Jung have put them forward.

1. The hero’s journey starts in the Ordinary World. The hero—male or female—is “stuck,” but he or she senses some powerful, tectonic energy moving beneath the surface.

2. The hero receives a “call.” This may be positive—an invitation to climb Annapurna—or negative … we’re arrested and thrown in jail. Or, like Odysseus, the hero commits a crime against heaven and is “made to” undergo an ordeal of expiation. But one way or another, you and I are ejected from Normal Life and flung, willy-nilly, into Something Totally New.

3. The hero “crosses the threshold.” She moves from the Ordinary World to the Extraordinary World (also known as the Inverted World.) Like the children in The Chronicles of Narnia, we pass through a portal and enter a realm unlike any we have known.

Is any of this ringing a bell?

4. The hero encounters allies and enemies, undergoes challenges and heartbreaks, temptations and overthrows. The hero suffers. The hero loses her way. The hero has been caught up in an often hellish adventure (though with some good moments too), from which no escape seems possible. The stakes are clearly life and death.

5. The hero perseveres. Reckoning that there’s no turning back, the hero pushes on, often blindly, almost always wracked by despair and self-doubt, seeking he or she knows not what. Escape? Redemption? A conclusion of some kind to this crazy, upside-down enterprise?

6. The hero comes face to face with the villain. The villain may be internal. It may be a creation of the hero’s own mind. Or it may be the Minotaur/the While Whale/Satan in the Desert of Judea. Whatever form this villain takes, the hero fights it tooth-and-nail, to the death.

7. The hero reaches an All is Lost Moment. The villain is too strong. The abyss yawns. All hope seems gone …

8. The hero achieves an epiphany. Often this takes the form of a surrender or an acknowledgment of a truth long-denied. “I can’t do this alone.” “Yes, I have a problem with alcohol.”

9. The hero races toward Home (whatever form that may take in his/her mind), clinging to his/her epiphany. The villain may be hot on the hero’s heels, or time and distance may have taken his place as the enemy …

10. The hero returns Home. But she is no longer the person she was when the passage began. Her ordeal has changed her, matured her, broadened and deepened her view of herself and of life.

11. The hero returns with a “gift for the people.” This may take the form of violent action, like Odysseus slaughtering the Suitors, or it may come gently, as music or poetry, to restore order and bring harmony to a disordered world.

The point of all this is that our passage through the wilderness is not random and not meaningless. It is a hero’s journey, in the best and most positive sense. It may not seem that way while we’re in it. In fact, it must seem bereft of meaning while it’s happening or it wouldn’t be “the wilderness.”

In fact, our passage is not merely touched by meaning but imbued to its very core. This doesn’t help, I know, in the midst of the ordeal. But it’s true, and we will know it, on every level, when the passage is at last complete.

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