Book 67 - A Year of Magical Learning

Reflection Title - What Happens When You Don't Find a Mission on Your Quest?

Book - Big Sur by Jack Kerouac

Book Description: Big Sur is a 1962 novel by Jack Kerouac, written in the fall of 1961 over a ten-day period, with Kerouac typewriting onto a teletype roll. It recounts the events surrounding Kerouac's (here known by the name of his fictional alter-ego Jack Duluoz) three brief sojourns to a cabin in Bixby Canyon, Big Sur, California, owned by Kerouac's friend and Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The novel departs from Kerouac's previous fictionalized autobiographical series in that the character Duluoz is shown as a popular, published author; most of Kerouac's previous novels instead portray him as a bohemian traveller.

Reflection:

I've always heard of the name, Jack Kerouac, in popular culture. I didn't know why he was famous, who he was, what he did, or anything about his life. I honestly didn't know if he was a real person or not. I came across one of his books, Big Sur, and I thought I dive in to see what Jack Kerouac was all about.

I learned a lot about this man through his writing. The biggest thing I learned was how sad his life seemed. I felt awful for this guy as he talked about his life as he visited what was supposed to be a retreat to get his mind right up at a secluded cabin in Big Sur California. That retreat was anything but relaxing as it became one big drunkfest where he surrounded himself with all of his vices (people, women, booze) to keep himself from himself.

Learning about his life, I came to learn that Jack was a pioneer of something called the Beat culture. The central elements of Beat culture is the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration. In theory, this sounds great, which is probably why it took off and resonated with so many people.

A Young Jack just beginning his quest would have motivated the shit out of me with his energy and his words (if I had to guess). I'm actually looking forward to reading his first big hit novel, On the Road Again, to see if I get a different perspective of the man. In Big Sur, this was the old Jack. The Jack that had been questing for 20 years now and had lost his way. He is sad, lonely, depressed, and his vices are consuming him. I feel like that is what happens when your quest never turns into a mission.

Questing is not for the faint of heart. A personal quest makes you dig deep into your soul to find out what you are really made of and value in life. You will unearth some things about yourself that you do not like and can break you if you let it. However, the quest is necessary if you really want to take hold of your life. You do that, by turning what you learned on your quest into a mission to guide you back to reality and a purpose driven life. Jack, sadly, never made it back from his quest and died at an early age. If I had to guess, a lot of the beatniks ended up the same way as their culture is no more in the modern day.

You can get a lot of people excited by building a culture around personal exploration, but at the end of the day, it (and you) need to find a purpose or it will not end well.

Question: Is Your Quest Stuck in Limbo? How you can you turn your search into action?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Big Sur

YOML Bookstore - Big Sur by Jack Kerouac