“The Privilege of a Lifetime Is Being Who You Are”
Hello and thank you for visiting our website. We are — Karen and Steve Drinkard — best friends, marriage and business partners. We make our home in Montgomery and Dadeville, Alabama. You can expect to find stories and messages here that touch many topics of living, laughter and learning in work and play.
The wisdom of Joseph Campbell provides us with the thematic heading for this salutation. Karen and I believe that life and work should be fulfilling to our spiritual and physical needs. But what does that mean? And how do we experience life in pursuit of that goal?
Life is filled with paradoxes. One of the most profound of those paradoxes is discovering that we must lose our life in order to find it.
We experience life as a journey of relationships. Life calls us to take long and winding roads. We are challenged to enter by the narrow gate. We are warned to avoid the wide, well-worn path that leads to destruction.
Joseph Campbell describes our transformation:
CAMPBELL: If you realize what the real problem is— losing yourself, giving yourself to some higher end, or to another— you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial. When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. And what all the myths have to deal with is transformations of consciousness of one kind or another. You have been thinking one way, you now have to think a different way.
MOYERS: How is consciousness transformed?
CAMPBELL: Either by the trials themselves or by illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it’s all about.
Campbell, Joseph; Bill Moyers. The Power of Myth (pp. 154-155). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
These trials and revelations combine to challenge who we become. Our education, family, vocation, recreation, spirituality, psyche and environment contribute to the recipe of choices that make a life worth living. Every life forms a story. No wonder we love stories so much? Because our life is a story that unfolds as the years go by like never ending rivers flow. Our limited free will meets with fate in a confrontation with destiny forged by the gods.
Joseph Campbell identified a common story theme in the mythology of many world traditions. These cultures show that life is structured by single mono-myth. There is just one story. One framework subconsciously guides our life and circumstances. In Campbell’s first masterpiece, A Hero With A Thousand Faces, he provided the storyboard framework for hundreds of movies, including the Star Wars series by George Lucas.
This mystery plays out in the hidden imagination creating the stories of our own life. Most of us never know it, at least not early in life. Subconsciously, we see ourselves in the stories we love. The privilege of a lifetime is to get on with living our story in the fullness life has to offer. What forces of Nature compel us into our journey? Will we answer the call? How do we experience joy and endure sorrow?
We want to experience some of life with you by sharing interesting and helpful information. Life is not fulfilled without self development, strength of character and improvement of mind, body and spirt. It takes work and play to make life fun and free. As we share with one another, maybe we will experience the gods transforming us and shaping our destiny.
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