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I’ve been sharing some very interesting discussions with Julie Stiles about life paths, life stages and so on, and I’d like to share some of those ideas here.

One of the main things I wrestle with, and which I’ve got a bit more of a handle on now, is that life paths are often rather hard.  “Follow your bliss” may be a good bit of advice from Joseph Campbell but large portions of his life were very hard work, and not blissful at all.  What we have to realize is that the bliss we feel will help to move us through the difficulties, the hardship, the tedium.  We also need to know that the bliss may not even be recognizable as anything much.

In Jane Eyre, Rochester, exercising his rights as aristocrat and employer, opens her drawing album and looks at the strange expressionist pictures Jane has produced.  He’s struck by them, and asks her, twice, whether they are her own work. Then he asks her if she was happy when she drew them.  It’s a loaded question: she could interpret it as, ‘Are you a morbid person who draws?’ or as ‘What was your mood at the time’  Jane’s reply is all but miraculous.  She says that she doesn’t know if she was happy but that she was fully engaged, absorbed, and the time flew by.

It’s not the polite, evasive reply Rochester expected.

She addresses, right away, what it feels like to be in a space of creativity, and she doesn’t make it melodramatic.  She simply acknowledges that when one is fully engaged in a task that is personally creative, then nothing else exists.  Rochester gets this, right away.  He doesn’t question further. And perhaps he envies her this inner calm, since he has so little of that himself, and since he starts to feel drawn to her from that moment on.

Charlotte Bronte knew this same space she attributes to Jane, since she was a writer who entered it on a regular basis. The way of creativity is always a way to the life path.

Which brings us back to life paths. Don Juan suggests that all paths are ultimately the same, since all paths lead nowhere in the end.  What he asks is whether we feel our path has ‘heart’. Heart is not a sociological term or a psychological term - it’s a spiritual term.  Heart is what sends you back to a task because you feel it is vital to you to do it, not because it’s fun, not because it pays well, and not because it’s seen by others as good.  It’s what you do so you can become more of who you are.

Jane Eyre almost loses her way, of course.  St John wants her to marry him and be a missionary.  And this would be conventionally and religiously a ‘good’ life path.  Jane almost agrees.  But her stumbling point is she can’t marry St. John because he doesn’t love her, and doing so would violate her moral code. Notice how she theoretically could ‘do it for God’ but she hesitates to do something that is not true even if it seems to be in a greater service.  But she knows that basic tinkering wit the truth would exhaust her and kill her.  In fact, as she considers this she’s defining her real life path, which truly does have heart, which is why she has to know what has happened to Rochester.  She finds him, and rediscovers where she’s supposed to be in life, rather than where people want her to be. Think about that: looking after a blind and crippled Mr Rochester must have been hard work most of the time.  But because they love each other the bliss outweighs the work.

Finding a life path is steady and prolonged work.  It’s also the Warrior’s work.  And the Warrior has to link to the compassionate self, or to the one who is loved, to achieve the Warrior-Lover balance.