Hero 🗞️ Slow News Day #80

Hey,

The Hero’s Journey sees a protagonist take up the call of adventure, departing from their daily life to face challenges and glories alike. Their final act is the homecoming—a return to the place they left all that time ago—that cements their progress, their change and transformation.

I make no claim to heroism, but what are we if not the protagonists of our own stories?

Two years ago, or thereabouts, we set out on our adventure. Leaving the daily life we’d built in our little rental in Exeter (as our landlord decided to sell up) and opting to live nomadically for the next however-long-we-fancied.

Cut to today, we’re in the process of buying a house back here in Exeter.

Challenges, glories, lessons, all the rest of it crammed into the last two years.

And this is where I come undone, if only a little… I’m not sure I’ve changed.

Any fabled transformation is unclear—to me, at least.

Maybe it’ll feel obvious after I’ve felt settled here for a little while, but right now I’m the same old Joe. I like the same stuff, I feel the same way about the world, I want the same things.

My Hero’s Journey, then, might not have been the journeying I’ve been living. Who’s to say it should be so blatant? It could even be that it’s just a literary device that doesn’t really apply to messy, squishy, unpenned life.

I wasn’t looking for change, but having walked the most obvious and literal path to it… I can’t help but feel a little short-changed.

Does change happen when we put ourselves into a changing situation? Or is it uncontrollable? Unknowable?

Slow down guide

Need a little help moving slower?

Ease your way out of Friday afternoon with this newsletter, a nice cup of something, and a little background music. Steal my setup if you aren't sure where to start.

After I press send, I’m quaffing a cuppa Crediton Coffee. (Quaffee.) Guatemala, baby! Highly recommended and never not hilarious that it’s brewed not even 1km from where I went to school. Nothing cool like this ever existed back in my day. What a world, what a lot of change. Hey, wait a minute…

Both Mimi Gilbert and I want you to listen to Society’s a Mansion. Mimi wrote it, so that’s understandable, and I’m loving listening to it this week. Pretty simple reasons, it turns out. It’s a little lo-fi, it’s a little country, it’s a lot of loveliness. What a chorus, as well. Enjoy this one.

Take it easy,