The Call to Adventure
The urge to do something is often forced upon us by circumstance, and despite what you may believe, usually precedes even the desire to do that thing. Travelling the world is no different.
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23rd September 2011
I’m 23 years old.
Baggage dragging behind me and another one thrown over my shoulders, I walk alone out the doors of the Waterfront station in Vancouver’s downtown and ask myself, quite possibly out loud:
“What the hell am I doing in Vancouver?!”
It’s 2011 and Ireland is in the depths of a merciless economic recession. The old national pastime of emigration has come roaring back into fashion following the brief existence of a strange phenomenon whereby people were actually coming to our island to try and earn a living for themselves, rather than fleeing it to survive like rats and cowards flee ships on downward trajectories, but everyone’s gotten sick of the novelty of it all and let the whole place go to fuck again altogether. Down the swanny and everyone’s been rinsed out the bloody gap again. The national pastime has been trumped by the national passion and divine birth-right: small-time institutional corruption on a national scale, snivelling gombeenism[i] and mediocre hand-shaking fuckery of the highest order have destroyed the country’s roaring economy and brief-lived general enthusiasm for life, not for the first time. Perhaps these miserable characteristics also built the whole thing in the first place, to give them their due, but they have reared their ugly, be-suited and sweating heads to pull the legs out from under it again nonetheless.
Ireland is in ruins. Unemployment is up on 25%, or more, depending on your age. Families destitute. Mortgage repayments flatlining. Austerity. Pension funds gone up in smoke. Worst of all, the off-licences are closing at 10pm. And so on, and so forth. You get the idea.
The 21st century misery is not skeletal widows in shawls weeping over grass and bogs in earthy-toned oil paintings, it is the grey concrete shell of an unfinished retail park in the Limerick suburbs, of Toyota Rav 4s with their windows smashed in, unsold ham paninis with heated cheese oozing out the sides sitting derelict in fogged-up deli windows, it is dubstep music and €10 ecstasy; nobody’s dancing.
It’s not the first time the consciousness of our never-fine nation and culture have responded like this to such circumstances, their problems looking to resolve themselves by their collective gaze being swept along on winds, thar sáile, over-seas, a national expression of avoidant attachment.
This is far more part of your national identity than your pint of Guinness or your bacon and cabbage or your sports and dancing and casually acceptable alcoholism; this is the deeper source of all these things, the archetypal foundations and origins of what amount to just surface details.
But it’s my first time.
My first time getting these notions.
That going somewhere else could solve everything.
That if only I jumped on a plane and went to some random part of the world to construct new versions of all the things I had here then I’d never have to acknowledge the reality approaching ahead of me, of having to go through with the tedious business and mundanities of life – careers, jobs, offices, clean clothes, relationships, forms and pretending to be half normal – the same as everyone else.
Why not just go off there somewhere else for a bit and do something else for a while. It might all be gone when you come back.
A very Irish solution to Irish problems.
I’ve met Spanish people, for example, since then, who couldn’t comprehend living like this. Not a job to be found for love nor money and it wouldn’t even cross their minds to just leave, even if it meant making their fame and fortune somewhere else.
“We have good weather, good food, our families… so what if we have no job or money? Why would we go anywhere else?” I’ve been asked on more than one occasion.
Maybe this is one of the indirect benefits of being a colonial power – a deeply ingrained belief that your home is in fact the best place in the world, and that by extension, you are indeed the best person in the world. Not the mentality the abused party are left with, that it’s a good for nothing, god forsaken hellhole of an island, floating in a sea of piss on the damp cold edge of existence. I think I’ve always been of southern European temperament at heart, the society of siestas and plazas and ambling on cobblestone streets and living to the age of 100 at a leisurely pace.
Psychologists call it avoidant attachment. Society calls it running away from your problems, instead of confronting them. Of trying to eke out an existence with whatever meagre resources you have. Whatever, leaving is just the rational response to the task at hand. Though some would say it’s irrational. Economists might call it economic migration. They’re all just labels.
Whatever. I knew I had my excuse. Sure everyone’s at it now, running away from home. Going travelling they call it now. You don’t need a reason, it’s become a fundamental part of life, a human right, a necessary rite of passage that they don’t teach you in schools, or they tried to and you were more concerned with getting legally served alcohol in a continental pub than allowing any of the cultural wonders of Bruges or Paris penetrate your eyes and your awkward adolescent heart.
I never wanted to leave home. I had everything I’d wanted up to that point right around me. But time waits for no man at no point. And we go through life for the most part blind to what we really need. We’re just feeling our way in the dark through a million things at once until the one you’re not looking for but is looking for you smacks you on the nose or is grasped awkwardly by your sweating clutch.
I’d never dreamed of going travelling. It’s not something that had appealed to me, drawn my attention, sung to me of its possibilities. Any opportunity I’d had until then, I’d run a mile from, either by turning down offers and opportunities, resisting conversations and ideas, not standing in the appropriate queues and filling out the required forms, or, when I had found myself in foreign lands, by rejecting all that was new and novel and interesting and turning so far inwards I was turning back on myself, rejecting the clear light of the newness of the day by going on the sesh with my Irish mates and trying to recreate my own small cross-section of space and consciousness I knew as ‘Home’ in a different chunk of space, over the single ocean and under the same sun. The most conservative pastime of all, standing still while the world grows around you.
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Staying home and having the craic[ii]. You can do it even on the other side of the world.
I resisted the Call to Adventure for so long, until I didn’t.
They’ll just call it emigration.
If anyone asks I’ll just tell them I’m looking for a job. Phone the census. Add me to the list. Another number.
Or say “sure everyone’s at it”.
That’s all anyone understands at home, anyway, whether you’re from Mayo or Manhattan, Limerick or Lebanon, Laois or Laos. It’s one of the things that defines Home: people only do things because everyone else does them. They don’t understand anything else. They don’t want to.
Wanting usually comes before understanding. It could be the first thing I ever learned for myself.
Ideas planted seeds in my head. Next thing I know I’m filling out all the forms, doing all the research, applying for the visa. A bunch of mates were coming with me, until they weren’t. They all ended up in London. Maybe they were looking for jobs. By the time we all knew it I didn’t care – I was going it alone. Even if they’d flown west with me, I’d have probably abandoned them too.
Too familiar.
“Why are you going to Canada?” people would ask, all interest and curiosity and friendliness and enthusiasm and compassion.
“I’m just going for the craic.”
A bit of mischief. Upset the apple cart of your soul and those around you expecting one thing from you and getting something entirely different, namely, your absence.
Sure everyone was at it. Boats laden down with emigrants floating aimlessly out of Dublin port every morning, noon and night that year. Coffin Ships 2.0, Y2K11 and all that. Dead and reborn again. No excuses needed. It’s almost easier this way. At least I won’t have to apply for a job around here – sure there are no jobs. Thank God. If there were jobs then I’d be in trouble altogether, because there still wouldn’t be one for me.
The path of least resistance in 2011, being a fresh-faced young lad from the west of Ireland, was to book a one-way flight to another country and start life all over again, even if only for a year or two.
A year away from home seems like a lifetime when you’ve never left it.
The coffin ships float both ways these days. You can always come back. In the old days they never expected to lay eyes on their families, or worse, the earth of their homelands, ever again. They’d have a mock funeral. They’d probably hate you if you did come back.
My great great grandmother (give or take a ‘great’) once shipped two of her sons off to Australia as punishment for acting up. All knowing they’d never be able to come back. But that’s a story for another day. She probably did them a favour.
Skype and the internet and cheap air travel has given everyone a lifeline these days, an extra life and a save game we probably don’t deserve and does us no good. When you’re gone you should be gone.
“For the craic”
Was the only way I knew how to answer.
The Refusal of the Call.
The rejection of the honesty that would be the source of your reward.
No need for it. Until there is.
Until, that is, flights booked and the realisation of what I was about to do started to hit me, I finally understood why I was doing what I was doing.
The Call to Adventure can lie dormant within us for much of their lives, until it spontaneously announces itself in unexplained circumstances.
It manifests itself as a great dissatisfaction in you that will eat away at you until you go about trying out things that will make it go away, namely, doing that which is your destiny, your calling, across all areas of your life. There’s no answer as to what those things might be, no best way. You just have to keep trying to solve the puzzle until you do.
Joseph Campbell believed that following your bliss was everyone’s true purpose in life. But there’s a long hard road ahead of you before you even find your bliss. You have to answer the Call to begin. There’ll be no overnight success. No material or even mental rewards. In fact, for a while you can expect the opposite to happen; the absurdity of your quest is likely to lead to a diminishment in your external successes in life. It’ll takes as long as it takes.
A great existential restlessness awaits you. When we’re mildly anxious we pace up and down the room, or jump from room to room tidying things – anything for a bit of movement to release the tension of our existence, any means to impose order on the world. We cannot sit still. The greater the restlessness in our souls, the greater the movement. It’s no wonder people go on great adventures. We all grow old through time, we all move through space. The simplest way to move through both is to travel.
I had no idea what travel was before this. I couldn’t have even called it that at the time. I was just about able to articulate the idea of moving abroad to another country by reference to the hundreds of thousands who’d been going before me. Doing the thing where people “go to Australia” except it wasn’t Australia. I’m sure I fabricated a bunch of reasons about what appealed to me about Canada in the meantime between decision and arrival. The snow, maybe? And the hearsay. About the opportunities. And the quality of life.
Never any inclination to do it. No thirst for adventure or the novel. No desire to break out of the sweet comfort of my home, my friends, the known knowns of the world. No idea that these earthly and known pleasures might be the very things keeping me stuck in ways I knew I needed to be unstuck from.
Until I did.
You know before you know. And you realise that time doesn’t stop, it only moves forwards. Faced with the existential reality of life, it’s funny how quick the desire for adventure came about, having lain dormant for much of my life. The Dark Riders on horseback had infiltrated the Shire.
There was nothing wrong with home, from what I could see or was aware of. I loved the place. I was just going on a bit of an adventure. I’d be back before long. Father’s popping out to the shops for a packet of cigarettes, never to be seen again. At least not in this life.
Famous last words.
The same thing happened to many people in those days. The cultural phenomenon of emigration had lain dormant for a generation. Things looked rosy on the surface. The whole country living in a bubble, safe from reality, until reality came knocking. Families destitute, lives ruined. Some of it even caused by the economic recession.
Economic woes? Don’t mind if I do. No-one will question anything. I won’t even have to question myself.
The Call to Adventure came knocking from within.
It will compel you to do strange things, and go to faraway places just to answer its call.
I had no idea, really, why I was going to Canada, until one day about two months before having just booked a one-way flight to Vancouver, I did.
The weight of it all hit me, probably because now there was no going back. The gravity of the situation forced me to reckon with myself in a way I’d never had to before.
Little did I know this would only be the start of a journey around the world and back in search of that place.
At this time the simplest, and only honest, answer to all the questions was:
I realised it was just something I had to do.
And that’s how I ended up in Vancouver.
[i] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombeen_man
[ii] ‘craic’/’the craic’ (uncountable noun, pron. ‘crack’), an Irish language word which at its simplest means ‘fun’, but is one of those untranslatable concepts whose roots run much deeper into the Irish psyche and culture; it includes but is not limited to fun, revelry, humour, music, dancing, story-telling, general enthusiasm, leisure, amusement, chaos and mischief. “To have the craic” means to “have fun”; “for the craic” is a basic motivator of action in all facets of Irish life.
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Two Joseph Campbells referenced and neither in the typical way, good job.