What is a hero? As defined by Miriam Webster, a hero is a person who is admired for great acts or fine qualities. When we are young everything seems larger than life. If lucky, there were people in our lives who became our heroes. Strong in ways never thought imaginable, had capabilities far beyond our realm of possibility. Then there were superheroes, scientists, athletes, scholars, artists all of whom we admired for their great acts, inspired by their supreme qualities. As adults we begin to evolve and our values change, some heroes remain and others reveal themselves. All the while like a good student of life we seek what we need in the inspiration of a “hero”. As the saying goes the teacher presents themselves when the student is ready. After all isn’t that what a hero is, a teacher, inspiring us, showing us that amazing things can be done and teaching us lessons along the way.
Life can be that teacher, it presents opportunity for growth, expansion of our personal potential we just need to recognize that. Only then can we realize that We are a Hero and This is our Journey. We can do great things and we can develop fine qualities. What makes us different from the “heroes” in our lives? It is perception, more appropriately, realization and consciousness that we too can do and be great, that we have the capability to be exceptional.
All heroes must go on a journey. At first they live an ordinary life, (think Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz or Luke Skywalker from Star Wars) and then they get the call to action. These heroes not only hear the call but answer it and thus the journey begins. The call to action, to rise up, is going to be different for all of us. For some we are finely tuned in to note when things are just a bit off and recognize the opportunity to grow, the need for change, others of us need a tornado to rip our home, the earth out from underneath us, to make us realize change/evolution is desperately needed. What the journey is, is our own. It can be small or epic (think Star Wars) but regardless life is going to change.
Now with this being said life changing events aren’t always easy. Once we have heard the call to action and the mind illuminated the road to transformation, to hero status isn’t easy. There is the road of trials and tribulations, battles to be faught, mentally and physically. Lessons learned from these battles are what change the fiber of our being. What was once a call to action is now a rite of passage, an experience that we transformed into wisdom. We ourselves find out who we are and what we are about. What we are made of and what is important in life, what we are passionate about and how far we are willing to go for that belief, dream, person or experience. And when executed to that degree we recognize hero status. We are the Hero of our Lives, of Our Journey.
Just like Luke and Dorothy all good heroes must make their way home. It is in the acclimating to everyday life, with the personal growth; newly attained wisdom and gifts from the experience that makes it all the while. That is transformation, from the perceived “regular self” to the “hero self”. We realize that through a call to action whether it be by our own initiation or adversity presented to us, we were quiet enough to hear the call, we were brave enough to answer the call and after working through the road of trials and tribulations we came home, transformed a hero, a warrior of our own life. And maybe just maybe we also became a hero, an inspiration for someone else too.
