Swimming Between the Flags

I’ve been writing a continuation of my items on Dave Snowden’s considering for a few weeks now. Brian’s astronauts allowed a pause and Snowden has revealed a dozen extra posts since his seven posts constructed across the metaphor of the channel and the estuary. But time is usually an phantasm on Substack, so in the event you haven’t learn his collection, that is new to you.

Then Scott Allison, a long-time heroism researcher, published a piece making the affirmative case for the hero’s journey as a form of shared cultural infrastructure, and the 2 concepts collided in my head and now onto the web page. Or the display screen.

Scott’s argument is heat and thoroughly made. He observes that we reside in a fragmented world, surrounded by tales however missing shared myths, and means that the hero’s journey affords a story grammar that doesn’t impose a particular perception system however supplies a typical construction for understanding how development occurs. Challenge, transformation, return. It’s versatile sufficient to work throughout cultures, he argues, and in a time when a lot divides us, that flexibility is perhaps precisely what’s wanted. Hard to argue.

In truth, I’ve made variations of that argument myself. I’ve watched it work in rooms for greater than a decade. So I need to have interaction Scott’s case significantly as a result of I feel he’s proper about one thing necessary. I’m simply undecided he’s proper about every little thing.

Here’s the place Snowden is available in. The central metaphor of his new collection is the distinction between a channel and an estuary. An estuary is the zone the place a river meets the ocean – shifting salinity, suspended sediment, tidal rhythms, ecological richness. It’s generative as a result of it’s not secure. It holds issues in transition lengthy sufficient for brand new patterns to type. I need to borrow that metaphor and put it someplace nearer to house.

In Australia, we swim between the flags. That’s the place the lifeguards are assigned, the place the water has been learn and deemed manageable, the place somebody is watching. My child realized this in her nippers programme in Woodside. It’s good recommendation. The flagged water is genuinely safer. Outside the flags, the situations are unmanaged and unmonitored. It has rips, currents, and water that doesn’t behave predictably. People drown on the market.

But each coastal-adjacent Australian little one additionally learns easy methods to learn the water. How to determine a rip by the way in which the floor adjustments, easy methods to spot the darker water the place the present runs, easy methods to perceive situations relatively than simply observe directions. That second form of studying is completely different in nature from the primary. The flags inform you the place to swim. Reading the water tells you why, and what lies past, and when it’s okay to swim exterior of the flags or when there merely aren’t any flags.

Snowden’s argument is that well-intentioned frameworks can quietly develop into units of flags. Each one is positioned for a great motive. The behavior of swimming between them kinds slowly, at precisely the identical tempo because the capability to learn the water with out them atrophies. The loss isn’t skilled as loss. It’s skilled as security.

So, is the hero’s journey a set of flags, or does it educate individuals to learn the water?

I used to suppose the reply was apparent. I began instructing the framework to fifth graders in elementary faculties who have been petrified of center college. Not abstractly terrified. Properly, particularly terrified. Locker mixtures. Cafeteria menus. Getting misplaced in a constructing thrice the scale of their main college. The hero’s journey gave them a means of seeing their expertise that made the worry legible and the trail ahead possible. Campbell’s assurance that the heroes of all time have gone earlier than us, that the labyrinth is completely identified, landed for these children not as real aid. That felt like instructing them to learn the water. It gave them navigational capability, opening the situations relatively than simply marking a protected passage by means of them.

Snowden has one thing attention-grabbing to say about younger individuals in transition. He argues that they’re nonetheless within the estuarine zone. They haven’t been mounted into the classes that can ultimately slim their vary of navigation but. Their salinity remains to be altering, the patterns aren’t but set. In the same old account that’s a vulnerability. In his account it’s a useful resource. Reading that, I recognised these fifth graders instantly. They have been estuarine sensors earlier than I had language for it. The anxiousness I used to be working with wasn’t an issue to be solved. It was a spot of productive uncertainty, precisely the place new patterns type. What they wanted wasn’t flags. They wanted somebody to assist them learn the water.

The query is whether or not what I gave them did that, or whether or not it gave them a extra snug set of flags to swim between as an alternative.

I’ve been trustworthy sufficient with myself to confess that I’m not all the time certain the reply is the primary one. I’ve watched the hero’s journey develop into a set of flags in two particular ways in which I didn’t anticipate after I began instructing it.

The first is the ready downside. The framework lays out a name to journey – an exterior summons that initiates the journey. Taught with out care, it will probably educate individuals to attend for that decision relatively than exert company in its absence. I’ve watched individuals sit in conditions that required motion and clarify, within the language of the hero’s journey, that they hadn’t obtained their name but. The framework, designed to construct company, had perhaps changed it. The flags had been defined, and no one moved till the lifeguards had planted them.

The second is the timeline downside. The hero’s journey has an implied form (departure, initiation, return) and thus an implied momentum. People who aren’t transferring by means of that form on the anticipated tempo can expertise the hole between themselves and the framework as private failure. Particularly as they observe individuals round them hitting the suitable marks on the proper instances. The map turns into a regular they’ll’t meet. The water exterior it begins to really feel like drowning relatively than swimming.

Both of those are examples of the flags forming round one thing that started as open water instruction. I positioned them with good intentions. I’m wondering how usually they grew to become constraints I didn’t intend.

Snowden has a line in his collection that reminded of one thing I used to be launched to at camp: realized helplessness. This is barely completely different, however on the identical seaside. He’s writing about serving to relationships – therapists, consultants, educators – and he argues that there’s a particular pathology by which the helper’s authority relies upon structurally on the shopper’s incapacity. The helper who wants you helpless is constructing their very own flags. I don’t suppose I want my individuals to be helpless. I genuinely imagine the work I do builds water literacy relatively than dependency on the flags. But I additionally know that frameworks, over time, could make themselves crucial in methods their designers didn’t intend. The flags can cease being short-term and begin being the entire of the navigable world.

Which brings me again to Scott’s argument, and to why I need to maintain the dialog going relatively than merely disagree.

Scott is true that the hero’s journey supplies one thing genuinely helpful in a fragmented world. The analysis helps it. My expertise helps it. The framework does actual work. But a set of flags, nevertheless effectively positioned, all the time looks like protected water from inside them. They have been positioned for causes, by somebody, in situations that will or could not nonetheless apply. The hero’s journey as shared narrative grammar (ie Campbell’s monomyth provided as a cultural bridge) can also be, from a sure angle, a really particular set of flags offered as the entire of the swimmable ocean.

That’s not an accusation. It’s a query. And it’s one I’m directing at myself as a lot as at Scott’s argument.

What is the distinction between instructing individuals to learn the water and instructing them to swim between the flags. surf lifesaver does each (and Woodside Surf Life Saving Club definitely did). She locations the flags the place the situations are manageable, and teaches the swimmers why, and what the water past them truly appears to be like like, and easy methods to learn a rip in the event that they ever discover themselves exterior the marked space. The flags are short-term, conditional, and so they’re context-dependent. They’re not the ocean. They’re a place to begin for studying what the ocean is.

I feel the hero’s journey might be taught that means. I’ve tried to show it that means. I’m not sure I’ve all the time succeeded. But actually, I’m genuinely unsure whether or not any framework, nevertheless rigorously held, can keep away from changing into its personal set of flags over time – whether or not the shared grammar that helps individuals discover frequent floor additionally, progressively, marks the perimeters of the water they really feel allowed to navigate.

Scott, I’d genuinely wish to know what you suppose. Not about whether or not the hero’s journey is helpful – I feel we each know it’s. Rather, whether or not a framework can educate individuals to learn the water relatively than simply swim between the flags. Whether the narrative grammar that helps individuals make sense of their lives can stay open water instruction relatively than changing into managed passage. Whether the hero’s journey, at its greatest, factors past itself.

~ Matt