Those Who Stay At Home

There are those who go on the Quest, and there are those who stay at home.

Did you ever wonder how boresome it must be to stay at home, while Frodo and Merry and Pippin are on the quest? Or while Coyote is stealing fire from heaven, while you are digging furrows for maize? Or while Theseus skulks through the Labyrinth, while we try to schedule a conference call?

Well, we do know. We are the stay-at-homes.
Being on a Quest will change things forever; that is the whole meaning of the Quest in story and myth.

We thought we had a Quest in Vietnam, and we thought we had the key to the mythic dynamic in The Domino Theory, and if we could only thwart that old domino theory...
Alas.
We thought we had a Quest in Iraq; we thought we had a quest in Afghanistan. But it cannot be, for if we had a Quest, we would have been changed forever.
We are not changed. We are not ennobled. We do not see miles and miles.

We see as far as the racially offensive bumper sticker on the car in front of us, both of us sitting in yet another traffic jam on a hot summer day, burning gasoline and cursing the climate-changed induced heat...
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