Steven Pressfield - The Artists Journey: The Wake of the Heros Journey and the Lifelong Pursuit of Meaning

THE EPIPHANAL MOMENT

In Hollywood parlance, the All Is Lost moment is succeeded, often immediately, by the Epiphanal Moment.

In this moment, the hero experiences a breakthrough.

This breakthrough is almost always internal. The hero changes her attitude. She regroups. She sees her dilemma from a new perspectiveone that she had never considered before (or, if she had considered it, had rejected)a point of view that offers either hope or desperation amounting to hope.

The narrative now enters Act Three. The hero, fortified by this fresh hope (or desperation), charges full-tilt into the climax.

Sarah Connor stops running and turns to confront the Terminator.

Luke Skywalker boards his X-wing and flies against the Death Star.

Bogey makes the decision to put Ingrid, with her husband Paul, onto the plane to Lisbon, while he himself stays to confront the enemies of freedom.

Here is my Epiphanal Moment, as described in The War of Art:

I washed up in New York a couple of decades ago, making twenty bucks a night driving a cab and running away full-time from doing my work. One night, alone in my $110-a- month sublet, I hit bottom in terms of having diverted myself into so many phony channels so many times that I couldnt rationalize it for one more evening. I dragged out my ancient Smith Corona, dreading the experience as pointless, fruitless, meaningless, not to say the most painful exercise I could think of. For two hours I made myself sit there, torturing out some trash that I chucked immediately into the shitcan. That was enough. I put the machine away. I went back to the kitchen. In the sink sat ten days of dishes. For some reason I had enough excess energy that I decided to wash them. The warm water felt pretty good. The soap and sponge were doing their thing. A pile of clean plates began rising in the drying rack. To my amazement I realized I was whistling.

It hit me that I had turned a corner.

I was okay.

I would be okay from here on.

Do you understand? I hadnt written anything good. It might be years before I would, if I ever did at all. That didnt matter. What counted was that I had, after years of running from it, actually sat down and done my work.

This was my epiphanal moment.

My hero's journey was over.

My artist's journey had begun.

THE HERO'S JOURNEY

T he hero's journey is a myth that, according to Joseph Campbell, C.G. Jung and others, is common to all human cultures. This template exists in our psyches from birth, like an operating system or, perhaps more exactly, a piece of software within the operating system.