Answering the Call to Adventure
You’re doing what? At your age? Why I am learning to code
Oops! I did it again! Wrote waaaaay too much. I guess I’ll save it all for my book, but in the meantime if I am ever going to publish with any regularity I am going to have to adjust my writing style and cognitive scope. Regardless, in order to answer the question why I code I’m going to have to jettison all details and context (like why now and not 10, 20, 30 years ago? Why JavaScript? Why Bloc?)
Condensed down to it’s essence, I code because I need to code. Not for riches or renown, but for more metaphysical and existential reasons. It’s a bit ironic to say about something so based on my ability to reason and gift for logic, but coding just makes me feel engaged, fulfilled, and excited in a way nothing else ever really has. Quite simply: It makes me really frackin’ happy. Looking back I’ve known this for a while, but like Bilbo, Neo, and Luke before me I had refused The Call to Adventure, the second part of the Hero’s Journey as defined by my spiritual mentor Joseph Campbell:
“The Call to Adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero…. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or ‘culture,’ the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved. His flowering world becomes a wasteland of dry stones and his life feels meaningless even though, like King Minos, he may through titanic effort succeed in building an empire or renown, but whatever house he builds, it will be a House of Death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur. All he can do is create new problems for himself and await the gradual approach of his disintegration” — Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Sometimes fear holds us back from answering the Call and following our bliss. What if I fail? It’s certainly a possibility and the consequences are of failure are real, not just for myself but for those that depend on me. Sometimes it’s our own folly that stops us, especially in our youth when it’s so much harder to find your own path amid the cacophony of voices telling you this path, or that path, or the other path, whichever path they’re selling, is the one you need to follow. Sometimes it was just plain inertia holding me back: It’s too late to start I would say, my life is ‘good enough’. But lie as I might I knew it really wasn’t. There as many reasons people refuse their Call as there are people. Believe me, I know and I empathize. But if anything I’ve said resonates with you, please keep looking for your “Thing” , whatever it is that makes you go, gets you excited, makes you happy. Follow your Bliss:
If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be. If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn’t have opened for anyone else. — Joseph Campbell
To be clear I am not flippantly advocating people just toss all their obligations and responsibilities aside without a care. This is not a decision I made lightly or quickly. Months of research and testing of myself and educational pathways came first before I threw my lot in with the folks at Bloc and I will share more of that soon. I have teenagers and a mortgage among other serious concerns, and at age 51 trying to (re)enter an industry where 40 is over the hill might seem to be contraindicated. I just know how right it feels for me, how I am so energized I don’t care what I need to do and learn and keep learning to be good at this. Whatever it takes for however long it takes I’m IN, and I’m excited to IN, I have never been so IN about what I’m doing and I believe that will make all the difference.
Next time, why a Coding Camp, why on-line, and why Bloc.
