My loop of north-east Vietnam wasn’t my first bike trip, and I was happy that the sum total of my prior experience meant that, if nothing else had been learned over the years, at least on this one I didn’t pack much. Another product of experience revealed itself quite early on, as I became aware that this trip was following a similar pattern to not just many other road trips or travel experiences I’d had, but life experiences in general.
In some cases this pattern – or cycle, even – might play itself out over the course of the whole trip, with the various stages of the cycle coming roughly in the same order, though perhaps not in the same quantities. It also may happen that, following the pattern of the trip as a whole, each individual day may even bring with it the same stages of the cycle that the trip as a whole does. And so this trip began – like every other one before it that didn’t have a strict departure time (or destination, really) – late.
Following the late start there was the rather unnerving period of ploughing through rain and darkness on the first day; the trudging acceptance of the slightly underwhelming start to the second day in Bac Son (mostly the product of my own projections), before finally cresting a metaphorical hill on the way to Cao Bang (which, in the mountainous north of Vietnam, tends to occur coincides at the top of an actual hill – our minds are more intimately tied to our surrounding geography than we normally give them credit) before reaching a glorious latter half or final third in which everything seems to go just ‘right’ (or is overwhelmingly satisfying to the extent the beginning of the trip was underwhelming and disappointing).
This for me was on the entire third day of driving towards Ba Be, where, finally settled into the trip and psychologically and physically far enough into it that I was able to relax and fully enjoy where I was going (it helps that such stunning landscapes do some of the heavy lifting for you here). Finally, there is the inevitable and necessary return home.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is familiar to you. You’ll either have experienced it consciously yourself on some holiday or trip of your own, or in the day to day activities of your life, or you have watched a movie or read a book at some point in your life. Or, you may be familiar with the works of Joseph Campbell, the student and teacher of mythology who popularised the idea of the Hero’s Journey.
In his book The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Campbell outlines the ‘monomyth’ or archetypal story, which is a universal theme running through the stories of every culture on earth, handed down throughout history. The same themes and narrative and archetypal characters are present in all our stories, from old Celtic myths and folk tales, to Shakespearean tragedies, to fantasy novels such as Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, to Disney movies. I’ll never forget the first time I became conscious of this trend, long before I’d read or heard of Campbell, or understood or ever read about archetypes or psychology or philosophy – it was the simple realisation that yet another stupid Adam f*cking Sandler movie was following the same tired old cliched plot:
– ‘loveable’ loser (Adam Sandler) is loser
– Sandler meets girl who is way out of his league
– Sandler tries to get girl
– Girl seems interested, Sandler may even get the girl
– BUT, then he messes it up somehow – oh no! He’s ruined it
– Sandler learns lesson
– Sandler redeems himself
– Sandler shows girl he has grown, often at an airport (where he saves the day just before she embarks on a different journey)
– Girl ends up with Adam Sandler
Now, I know this is pretty much the plot of any romantic comedy, though as I stated, this is actually the plot of any story throughout history. It just took the hackneyed clichés of that particular actor’s output to awaken my adolescent mind to the fact that I was seeing was the same story again and again, every time. And the reason that every story and myth seems to follow the same pattern, stages and cycle (for it is a cycle that is always completed by the return home), is because it is the story of life itself.
Life as we know it is nothing but a series of stories we tell ourselves. This is how our brains piece together all of the information they get bombarded with each day. It’s how you maintain some kind of order in your life, which keeps you functioning, as rather than having to learn and process each new piece of information, the ones you’ve come across already (or things that resemble them closely enough). Mnemonic devices and assembling narratives around information points are well-known tools for super-memorisation tasks (like the Leaving Cert).
Each of these stories tells a familiar journey, with a familiar series of stages. The typical hero’s journey might be represented in its simplest and most symbolic way by something like Lord of the Rings, or the Legend of Zelda series (or, I suppose, an Adam Sandler movie). It’s generally a kind of coming of age tale where an ordinary person is prompted to do some extraordinary thing, facing some kind of challenge, which causes them to grow, before returning home.
“Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone: for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero path.”
– Joseph Campbell
People have been undergoing physical and metaphysical journeys for as long as humanity, and perhaps life itself, have existed. It is the story of evolution itself, the first genetic mutation which resulted in growth in consciousness that caused life to evolve from its incumbent form, a conscious or unconscious desire to see more of the universe, beginning with the world around them.
And it is the desire to slowly feel out the world around you that not only continues your personal journey of growth, but is vital just to stay afloat as life continues around you. It is our deepest desire and function as living creatures to continue to explore the world around us, and this is reflected by our need to explore our inner worlds as well – in both instances, we must keep moving.
I’ve used Einstein’s quote before, but as I said, every story is the same:
“It is the same with people as it is with riding a bike. Only when moving can one comfortably maintain one’s balance.”
– Albert Einstein
We may not notice or appreciate how important it is to our mental health, well-being and general functioning to allow some degree of chaos into the order of our lives. We normally incorporate this novelty into our lives without much thought, though sometimes a prescription dose is required in the form of a holiday or festival or some other break.
Our consciousness continues to move even if we’re not pedalling the bike in real life, and so we must expend the energy somehow in the real world in order to keep our balance internally. To do this our outer journeys must match the inner ones, either by travelling through space or travelling appropriately through time (which is what we know as ‘growing’ or ‘maturing’).
The cycle even appears to map onto processes which involve no travel at all, such as the learning of skills. In his books on Deliberate Practice, Daniel Coyle outlines the universal process by which we learn things and master skills, whether practical or internal. It is a story of sorts, that isn’t that different from the one told in countless iterations by the Hero’s Journey.
The individual has a set skill in mind, with a goal. Through a process of intention setting, attempting the skill, practicing just outside of their capabilities, reflecting and completing further iterations with their new-found knowledge, the figurative 10,000 hours of practice required for mastery ends up being 10,000 iterations of the skill, or 10,000 separate Hero’s Journeys.
The ‘gold’ that is sought by the Hero is the knowledge which will improve his skillset, and in returning and re-integrating with the world of his prior ability and knowledge, he marks the end of one journey, before quickly leaving on another one and practicing again. It is the same process by which you practice playing football, learn the guitar, learn to surf, or learn to write.
This illustrates to us the timeline of the potentially infinite number of journeys we can and do undertake over the course of our lives. Of course, the trajectory of your lifespan is the overarching meta (or mega) story, the one in which every other story and journey takes place. If examined, it too will follow the familiar stages. One can then trace similar stories to individual phases of life, periods marked by decades, years or months if marking by time, or by place – where we live – or by our relationships, or your career.
I’ve often wondered where indeed one trip begins and another ends. It seems the venturing to a far-away physical place is enough to mark the beginning and end of one, or certain periods of time do the job for us also. If such external markers are needed to demarcate psychological journeys, then we all could be having them at many times throughout our lives and not know it, unless we are well trained to do so.
Or it could be that we need to move about in order to trigger these shifts in psychological growth. Either way, I’ve learned that even a train journey an hour from Dublin can be sufficient to trigger incredible psychological shifts and bursts of creativity, that I presume are the release from being caught in one way of thinking for many weeks or months.
Although individual physical trips (like holidays to somewhere new) can be used to neatly mark where one journey begins and another ends, it’s often not clear-cut. Life is a journey through both space and time, and it continues to unfold as a series of fractals: of journeys within journeys within journeys; of stories within stories within stories. It seems to me in trying to answer the question of where one journey ends and another begins, the answer is always: right now.
Perhaps I am influenced by the reading of too many books, and watching of films that follow such patterns, though I don’t think I’m clever or competent enough to follow their instructions that closely. Nor do I want this series to be an Instagram-feed-with-words where I simply brag about places I’ve been and things I’ve seen.
Though in spending much of my time at home and abroad writing about and reflecting on these places and the effect they’ve had on me, I have noticed the patterns repeating themselves. In doing so I’ve noticed that my over-arching story, or any of the smaller stories within the stories that make up the bigger narrative – rather than being unique or interesting or special – is just like everyone else’s (including Adam Sandler’s).
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