We Must Be Willing To Get

From A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (1991), drawn from Campbell's final workshop at the Esalen Institute. The remark expresses the cost of the hero's journey: not adventure for its own sake, but the willingness to relinquish the identity, relationships, and expectations one has carefully constructed. Campbell saw this surrender as the mythological pattern underlying every major transition in a human life — the refusal to surrender is what traps people in roles, relationships, and careers that belonged to a former self rather than the self they are becoming.