The power of the question & the call to adventure

Fifteen years ago - around the time that some of you were born - I first shared this video with students:



The conversation that followed led to a practice in which I invited students to ask Big Questions about personally meaningful topics. Year after year, the results were spectacular.

Every question is interdisciplinary. As I wrote in my book, if you show me a cup of tea, I will show you botany, ceramics, fluid mechanics, gravity, color, the culture of China, India, England, America, the history of colonialism... I could go on. The only place we divide life into subjects is school.

Every meaningful question also holds great power. It begins like an itch. Maybe we can ignore it for a while. Maybe we even make a game to test our willpower. But if the question truly matters, it begins to drive us.

Exploring it further, especially these days, leads us to information that appears to conflict. Resolving these conflicts and getting to a place of understanding becomes an urge no less powerful than hunger or thirst. Social psychologist Leon Festinger called this state of mind cognitive dissonance.

This semester, you identified Key Interests in our first meetings. You already have your cup of tea. In our journey, therefore, the question plays a slightly different role. It is your Call to Adventure.

"The Call to Adventure" is the beginning of the monomyth. When we analyze the word monomyth, we see that it is "one story." As literature professor Joseph Campbell famously observed, every world culture throughout history developed stories that followed the same pattern.

The monomyth is also called the "Hero's Journey," because the structure of the story involves a young person who is called to adventure, goes through challenges and hardship, eventually becomes transformed, and brings newfound wisdom home.

You can see the elements of the Hero's Journey in myths from the ancient world, stories that parents have told their children for generations, and even in today's movies. Consider this Call to Adventure:



The Call to Adventure isn't always wanted. Sometimes life has a way of putting things in our path that we'd rather not see. This past year has been intensely adventurous for many of us. But the Hero answers the call. In the ancient world (around 2004, when I first started using the internet to teach), the syllabus for my courses was entitled, "Your Opportunity to Be a Hero."

So it is today. Each of you has received a Call to Adventure in the form of a question.

Will you answer?