Bella Caracappa: Flow vs. the Heroic Journey

    In American Camino, chapter 6, titled Spiritual Rambling: Walking in Wilderness as Spiritual Practice, describes the effects and stages of Flow, which entails being fully immersed in the present moment and gives a person an interconnectedness with the universe and nature. In Cambell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he seeks to understand and break down the classic hero’s journey present in many forms of literature and media. Flow and the hero’s journey, provided by Cambell, encompass different approaches to change and life as they describe the emotional, social, and physical changes one must face. Though drastically different, the process of Flow and the components in the hero’s journey parallel each other, despite one being based on a real-life journey and the other a fictional one. 

    The first similarity between Flow and the hero’s journey was the influence of religion. In chapter six of the American Camino, the author states that “religion gives humans a system of values, ideas, and practices which provide culture with a cosmos, an ordered reality.” (Redick 236) Religion's integration into the idea of Flow is similar to that in a typical hero’s journey. In Flow, actions and purpose align with a higher power or god, paralleled in the hero’s journey through the intervention of gods, such as in the Aeneid, as gods intervene in Aeneas's journey based on their will in complete disregard for the consequences of their actions. Another example is the influence of blind faith in a preferred religion, as many times, people are affected by the teachings or beliefs, with them mindlessly following a being that they have no solid confirmation of having existed. 

Another similarity between the process of Flow and the hero’s journey is the “shaking off the village”(Redick 248) and the call to adventure. In Flow, the shaking off of the village means stepping away from society and going beyond societal pressure to fully immerse yourself in the moment. In conjunction, Joseph Campbell says that the call to adventure “signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown” (Campbell 58) In Flow and the hero's journey, the adventurer must transfer their “spiritual center of gravity” away from society or the village, in order to accomplish the desired effect of flow or to truly start their heroic journey. In both cases, the subjects must be able to separate from what they consider normal and carve their own path by immersing themselves in the moment through a clear or different lens. 

A third parallel between Flow and the hero's journey is the disruption in one’s self associated with Flow and the apotheosis stage in the heroic adventure. American Camino cites that “it takes the disruption in oneself of the intended meaning in order to work through the complexity of an event that continues to become a memory” (Redick 243). My interpretation of this quote is that one must have a disruption within oneself, such as a loss of self or new focus, to better understand what happened in the past. Apotheosis is the peak transformation of the hero as they come to better understand themselves and that which happened in the road of trials stage. The two ideas parallel each other in that both deal with the transformation of self, be it good or bad, to make better sense of past actions and memories. Apotheosis and the disruption within one's self serve as independent transformative experiences to help further along the process of Flow and the hero's journey.

An alternative parallel between Flow and the hero’s journey is the approach of seeing the world through a child-like perspective. In the hero’s journey, the call to adventure is often a whimsical and child-like stage. In this stage, the hero is not yet corrupted by the world and forces that are set to impede the hero, as the hero is drawn in by a sense of wonder. This is the stage where readers see the most innocent version of the hero, likening them to that of a child in comparison to what they later become. In Flow, American Camino says that short-distance hikers “fail to engage as a curious child, hungry for a discovery of meaning and thirsty to find connections” (Redick 238). Flow is incumbent on the fact that a person aches and needs connection like a child's. The two connect in that both the call to adventure stage and the need for a childlike perspective in Flow are essential to the development of future steps of the process. 

The final similarity between Flow and the hero's journey is the self-emptying process of Flow and the belly of the whale stage of the hero's journey. In the American Camino, self-emptying means letting go of one's ego, as one is emptied of personal desires and experiences. In the belly of the whale stage of the hero's journey, Campbell says that this is a stage of “self-annihilation” (Campbell 91) and that the hero is “swallowed into the unknown” (Campbell 90). While self-annihilation connects to a more forced destruction of the ego and self-emptying a more voluntary and positive letting go of the ego, they are still very similar. A hero faces self-annihilation in order to gain new perspectives and face an unknown reality, while a person experiencing flow destroys their own ego in order to reach a higher level of understanding. Both ideas work under the same principle: the destruction of self in order to be reshaped. 

In conclusion, the process of Flow defined in the American Camino and the hero's journey outlined in the Hero with a Thousand Faces have many similarities. Though one is meant to be applied the a fictional personality and the other a real one, understanding both serve as a powerful tool in the understanding of both the real and fictional, as Flow and the process of the hero’s journey can be picked apart and applied to not just one's own life but that of others that they don’t understand.