You Never Really Come Back

Once upon a time, Tim Keller was explaining to a friend the difference between The Hobbit and the Trilogy. Of course, it came off as a metaphor for life. I don't like making other people's words the center-point of my blog posts because it's markedly redundant. But I've been at a loss for words and it's weighed on me. I like to convey my journey on here—failing to do so frustrates me. To relieve the tension, without further ado I give you Tim Keller:

The Hobbit is an adventure but the Lord of the Rings is a quest... An adventure is a there and back again. It's an exciting thing that you choose. And you go and you have your adventures, you have all your thrills, and it spices up your life and then you come home again and you pick your life up again where it left off.

An adventure is there and back again. But a quest is not something you choose; it comes to you. You sense a requirement. You're called to it because of what's involved. And you never really come back from a quest. In a quest you either die for the quest or if you do come back you're so changed that you never in a sense come back. You're never the way you were, you're changed so radically.

Italy, there and back twice, was my adventure.  That's what disoriented me most when I got back. I thought I would "feel called" to stay there for years. And though Italy does call, it's just in the way anything I love calls to me.

Italy was my adventure, the one that laid the foundation for the quest. I do think I have found my quest; that is, I have found the beginning of it, and I anticipate walking it out step by step even though I don't know where it goes.

I've explored a dozen maps of possible futures and settled on this one. This quest is bigger than me, harder than I wanted. By nature of the quest being so much bigger than me, I couldn't not choose it. Like when I'm standing on the prow of a fishing vessel in the middle of the ocean (okay, to tell the truth it was just 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey), and I can't resist jumping in.

Okay, also to tell the truth, at that moment I had taken Dramamine too late and was remarkably seasick, so I just wanted off the boat. But maybe the analogy still works. I'm seasick on a ship, and the ocean is calling, so I'm jumping. Who wants to be on the water when you can be in it?

The initial jump is not too big of a change (I anticipate knocking into the side of the ship a few times), but that's how quests are: quite slow. In return, they carry you far. So I'm just working my way through the next couple months, but then grad school starts at the end of summer and probably at the same time I'm moving one city over, to the mostly-dead city, the one I've avoided all my life because of the prison and the dirty basements and the struggling economy. 

Even if my quest is starting where I didn't exactly want it to, and it's going to require more from me than I imagined, it gives me some confidence to have found it.

Thanks, Mr. Keller, for the metaphor. Lord knows I can't live without metaphors.