A Joseph Campbell Companion

The first hard choice

You must spend your life walking through fields of lotuses, listening to the beautiful music of the sirens.

Always, you could come closer to the sirens, and risk destroying yourself.

Always, you could eat more of the lotus, and you could choose to abandon what matters.

This is the first hard choice. You must choose to be the kind

Joseph Campbell, who through his study of the human experience through our ancestors’ stories, concluded that “We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”80

Here’s why — at the root of this Myth of Finality is our belief that what we ultimately want is the outcome, the result. When we’re stuck in this myth, it means we’ve forgotten that we’re playing for the experiences of freedom, aliveness, love, and peace.