The barriers to this kind of growth are overcome whenever we stop viewing our flaws and problems as things to be solved or removed, and start viewing them a signals. What the problems are, really, are old solutions that have outlived their usefulness. From that point of view, whenever we do away with a problem instead of listening to its message, we trigger a string of events that lands us in trouble.

William Bridges. (2001). The Way of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments. Cambridge, MA: Perseus. (p. 188)

Comment:

Ripening as the Heroic Journey

by Reg Harris

Copyright © 2003 by Reg Harris. All rights reserved. Updated October 7, 2007. All rights reserved. Apart from properly cited quotes and short excerpts, no part of this article can be copied or used in any form without written permission from the author. For permission to use, please contact me.

One of the most important processes involved in the journey is often lost in the traditional concept of being "heroic." Heroic, for most us, has to do with facing a challenge and overcoming it. However, in the context of what Bridges calls "ripening," heroic takes on a different sense.

To be heroic in a journey of ripening is to view our weaknesses and problems as invitations to transcend our current understandings and limitations. They are not something to be "fixed" or overcome, in the traditional heroic sense, but more like the Self knocking on the door of self, or the person we could be tapping on the shoulder of the person we are and saying, "Time to get out of the way."

In another sense, problems are an invitation to take a deep sigh and relinquish behaviors and understandings that, at one time, served us well, but which have now become limitations that bind us to our past rather than adjustments that open us to our future.

Bridges calls this process "relinquishing." In the journey model it occurs during the stage of challenges and temptations. When it is complete, we enter what Bridges called the "neutral zone" (abyss or void in the journey model), a period of no-self, when old meanings have been deconstructed and new meanings have not yet formed. It is a time of emptiness, confusion and angst because it is--ironically--the moment of greatest freedom. With no meaning structure, our sense of being in the world has momentarily been lost; however, with no old meaning structure to bind us, we are free to create a totally new meaning structure, a structure that better fits who we are and what we are becoming.

The real tragedy is that, in our consumer culture, people try to repress or avoid this life-affirming angst by replacing the pain of transformation with the immediate satisfaction of consumption (and the work that makes it possible). Such avoidance is an existential illness which we do not see as an illness. As Erich Fromm wrote,

Indeed, one thinks of the idea of "illness" only when someone is sicker than other people. When, however, everyone suffers from the same illness, the idea of illness does not at all arise in people's minds. Thus, this inner void, this inner anxiety, is symbolically cured by compulsive consumption (The Essential Fromm, pp. 69-70).

Our consumer society recognizes, on some level, this fear, this desire to avoid the angst. It encourages us to transmute the fire of transformation into the flame of desire. Thus we accumulate more and more while feeling less and less ourselves. In the journey model, this transmutation is referred to as the "call refused," and it leads where all self-denying behavior leads: the death of our own sense of being in the world.

In education, the same process occurs, also with a full sense of normalcy. Our children's natural urges to grow and transcend themselves are channeled (through fear) into getting grades, into preparing for the future, into making oneself marketable in a market-oriented culture. In the guise of preparing our children for their future, we are robbing them of their present. The fire of their intensity, which should fuel growth and self-discovery, produces nothing but the ashes of a childhood unlived because it was spent focusing on an abstract, unknowable future rather than on engagement with the present world that is real and knowable.

Essentially, we do not allow ourselves to "ripen," to become what we are through a natural, hermeneutic process of being-reflection-new being. We have turned the life-giving chaos of the abyss into a perceived threat to some illusionary sense of security. Unfortunately, that "security" is built not on present-moment understanding and potential, but on the foolish beliefs that the future will be like the past and that our future selves will see and respond to the world like our past selves.

There is no life in his view. There is no journey.