Epic journeys

One of the most enduring human myths is that life is an epic journey and that we’re all heroes involved in notable adventures. And if for some reason we haven’t got our own story yet, it is because the story is waiting just around the corner for us to step into it and wear it.

An epic journey filled with heroic twists and turns. The word epic comes from the Greek epikos which means both tale and promise. Our epic mythology fuses the tale and the promise in an existential coil which helps make sense of the mess that is the dynamic environment of life. The promised land is the tale we must inhabit.

We take life as an odyssey, a journey forward or backword, an expedition to conquer, save or recapture. The archetypical stories have already been told, and the reason they prove to be so indestructible is that we are staunch believers in the underlying truth that these stories convey.

Whether around the fire or on the fired-up platforms of social media, we tell each other epic stories of ourselves and the heroes we admire. We rewrite history with every tale we tell and redraw the blueprints of our own yet unembarked-on journeys.

From time to time, we go off road and off script but the myth always brings us back on the well-paved road, where the throng of heroes and villains reminds us that we are not just part of a story, but the embodiment of a tale in need of a raconteur.