“And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs…But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end…But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” – Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers
This is perhaps J.R.R.Tolkien’s most famous passage about finding one’s Story, their Purpose. Often people don’t realize they are missing their purpose until thrust into a dire situation. That’s when one learns the true “measure of a man” (or woman), or one becomes Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
For most people, they know they are meant for something bigger. They know they have settled for what the world told them they should be doing, not what they were meant to be. Like when Captain Pike dares Kirk to be better:
“You can settle for less than an ordinary life, or do you feel like your meant for something better, something special?…I dare you to do better.”
Why do so many stories in our books and films feature the longing for something more? For something missing? Because this speaks to the longing in all of us. We are part of a greater Story, but we feel like we keep arriving forty minutes too late. John Eldredge writes in Epic:
“Notice every good story has the same ingredients. Love. Adventure. Danger. Heroism. Romance. Sacrifice. The Battle of Good and Evil. Unlikely heroes. Insurmountable odds…Things were once good, then something awful happened, and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken…It’s true of every fairy tale, every myth, every Western, every epic…Have you ever wondered why?”
You are the answer. This is in everyone. For every vapid exhortation to “find one’s truth,” most let others define their truth. Never stop fighting until you achieve what you were gifted to be. Don’t let the world tell you what to be, or what to do. They want you compliant and ordinary. C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Indeed. Too often we give up, give in. This is a war against you. Many forces want you to fail.
Still, the choice is yours.
I’d rather go down fighting in the arena.
One of the themes of the Watchers of the Light series is exactly this: Find your Story. Find your Purpose.
This is the tale we all find ourselves in. The one storytellers write about. The daily war of finding our purpose, our place in the Story, and what we were gifted to do.
You only fail if you do not fight for that purpose and your place in the Story.
Darrick Dean 