How can we spend more time as our ‘heroic selves’?
Every year, I staff Otherworld, a yearly adventure weekend that lets participants spend a weekend adventuring as their “heroic selves.” As a participant, Otherworld was one of my funnest weekends ever. As a staff member, it’s been fantastic as well.
This year, I was a “Companion.” I traveled with a group of adventurers, making sure they didn’t fall off a cliff, supplying power bars when needed, etc.
By the end of the weekend, I was beaming with pride for my group. Whenever they came across a group having a challenge, be it combat, a locked treasure chest, or not having enough Royals to pay for lunch, they leapt to the rescue. It’s not required by the adventure, nor is it rewarded.
It struck me afterwards at how powerful it was, watching a group that were genuinely living with a heroic, generous spirit, while still keeping to their own quest and taking care of themselves. I see this so very, very rarely in my daily life. It seems like our culture is one of “take care of #1.” Sure, we provide a market economy and some resources to do it, but there’s really no sense of “we’re in this together.”
Spending a weekend with my group’s heroic selves really inspired mine.
In real life, my current heroic venture is helping to mentor a Junior Achievement group of high school students in creating and running a business. It’s a 2-hour commitment, once a week, for 12 weeks. By the time I’m done I will have spent a whole day (24 hours) this year being heroic. That’s about 1/4% of my time spent heroicly.
How much of your time do you get to spend as your heroic self? Any ideas for how to increase that number?
To what degree do you believe “we’re in this together”? Are we ALL in this together? And what exactly are we in together?
October 31st, 2007 at 1:39 pmIf you’re using the Internet, you’re part of the “we’re all in this together” crowd. If you have any doubt, turn off your sewer for a week and call me then (from a distance, please).
We’ve been so good at creating an interdependent society that we have a bizarre illusion of independence. We buy pre-packaged meals at the Grocery, pre-slaughtered meat, cook it in water from our convenient tap, heated on our gas stove, and somehow entertain the notion that we’re independent.
We all depend heavily, VERY heavily, on each other and the products of the wonderful economic system we’ve created. And if you’re using the Internet for even the simplest of tasks, you’re depending on thousands of others every day, to maintain the configurations, physical infrastructure, and software infrastructure that make up the net.
November 4th, 2007 at 11:46 amI personally believe that we’re all inherently good people. Perhaps if we just take a little time to listen to our inner voices, our heroic selves would have more opportunities to present themselves. Things like appointments, schedules and the like keep us living a fast-paced life and we start to think that we have no more time for anything else.
November 14th, 2007 at 6:23 am