The Call to Adventure and Some Personal Thoughts on "The Fellowship of the Ring" by JRR Tolkien

I am confident there have been countless books written about the Lord of the Rings and that I am not saying anything new here, but for my own sake I wanted to express a thought from my reading of the Fellowship of the Ring. 

Change and Stability - The Warring Laws of Nature

From the very beginnings of philosophy in Ancient Greece there has been recognition that there are two central warring forces in nature herself, change and stability. Everything is always undergoing some type change to its being, and yet at the same time things also retain their identity through those changes. For example, a river flows and is never the same twice, and yet it is the same river. Our bodies age and our cells replace themselves, yet we are the same person. Our hometown develops or decays, and yet it is the same town. This dichotomy is a fundamental fact of nature. 

On a human level it is unsettling that we do, indeed, live, and yet we could also die unexpectedly at any moment. We must act out, prepare, and plan for our future here on earth -- getting an education, setting up a career, investing our money, etc. -- while at the same time not knowing if any of it will come to fruition. We desire to be successful in so many endeavors of our life, and yet it may not really matter at the end of the day whether we do get that promotion or win that trophy or not. 

We must attend to the daily needs of the body, while knowing that it is the needs of the soul that are most important. We must cook, eat, clean, sleep, exercise, socialize, work, and rest ... knowing that their effects will not last and we will have to do the very same things tomorrow. There is no ultimate permanence with these things. 

The Desire for the Stability of the Shire

And so it seems universal that everyone desires a type stability which reaches beyond the constantly demanding changes of the human experience and moves towards the Shire, so to speak; towards Bag-end, where the daily processes of life may find a type of longer lasting stability. It is normal to desire a place where the seasons may pass but life is fundamentally the same, ordered towards a rest, stability, and the leisure that brings peace to the human soul. "He [Frodo] would come with me, of course, if I asked him... But he does not really want to, yet. I want to see the wild country again before I die, and the Mountains; but he is still in love with the Shire, with woods and fields and little rivers."

Change in the Necessary Call to Adventure

And while the desire is very real to create a "Shire of permanence" for ourselves, no one can remain in the Shire forever, not even Bilbo or Frodo. All must leave, because the hiding away from the world leads to a stagnation of the soul. There cannot be complete permanence in this life, and so primeval change must rear its head up again. 

Bilbo's body has ceased aging with the ring in his possession, but his soul is disturbed by the stagnation and he realized he must leave it behind. "I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread. ... I want to see mountains again Gandalf, mountains...". 

And so this necessary change takes the form of a call to adventure for the growth of the human spirit in the face of life's challenges. Indeed, the individual must grow so that they can deal with the changing nature of the world and the changing nature of the phases of their lives. Everyone must leave the stability of our known worlds and enter into the darkness of the unknown where there are dangers and dragons, Balrogs and orcs, wizards and elves. Staying too long at home presents its own set of dangers. Evil amasses in the shadows, and if we remain blind to that evil it may overcome us before we can even put up a fight. 

A Middle Way? The Inner Shire of the Conscience

The call to adventure is not without risks itself. People die on adventures. Not everyone makes it home, and if they do they are certainly not the same. And so it seems that the human condition is one which exists between the proverbial rock and hard place. If I stay too much in my comfort zone then I will face perils ... and if I go out into the unknown I will face perils... What should I do? 

Here the characters of Tolkien's Fellowship may be guiding us towards an answer of finding that longed for stability within ourselves rather than from exterior circumstances. If we can learn to let our inner self become comfortable being uncomfortable then amidst change and growth we are also able to begin to find that longed for stability. If we can create some type of inner Shire which brings the soul to a type of permanence while it is out on adventure, then maybe both forces of change and stability can be embraced.

But how does one create the "inner Shire"? To the Pre-Socratics and the Sophists Socrates showed in his Apology, that regardless of what is happening to our bodily selves, no one can violate the inner sanctum of our conscience if we ourselves choose to keep our values intact; if we choose to keep intact that which most shapes the person we are. And so peace and permanence must come through a codification of our values and the strengthening of virtue to the point where we can live those values regardless of what's happening around us. Then we will be able to embrace both life's changing nature in the call to adventure and the permanence of the Shire.