From Mediocre to Mythic! - Benjamin Stephenson
Mediocrity. The very common, very average, very comfortable road most traveled. What a damn shame way to live a life. A place where on the surface everything appears to be going good, but inside a voice is crying out that there must be more to life, more of you craving to be revealed. Nothing is ever really challenged and nothing ever really changes. The status quo. It might not be the horror movie of modern-day full-blown paradox celebrating human weakness, self-pity, and victimhood, but maybe just maybe it's even more dangerous than that. Insidiously, it creeps into a heart with a seductive soothing lie saying "You're good" and “You're doing your best”. Then we verbalize the lie to others to gain some sort of pat on the back for not making ourselves truly proud. Mediocrity creeps into our hearts and we wrap ourselves in a warm blanket of bullshit. It keeps you in the grey, a place where nothing changes, nothing truly remarkable happens, no growth is achieved and your heart stays flat. A betrayal of the voice inside of us pushing us to create something worth living with our lives. Mediocrity is the death of the mythic inside our hearts.
I've been struggling pretty hard to find my power and my happiness these past few years as if watching a train wreck in slow motion. My internal world became chaos, and although I struggled very hard in all the wrong ways to turn it around, I watched the life I had been creating deteriorate in California, my business partnership collapse, and then my marriage. I held resentment in my heart and an unbearable amount of shame at the man I was watching myself becoming. Something needed to shift and shift violently.
I know for one I'm done telling myself “I did my best”. What serves me right now is to feel that I have no idea what my best is, that I know deep down I got so much more inside of me raging to burn through layers of bullshit and unleash itself into making my life something I can be truly proud of.
So what's the cure for a life half-cocked? Take a big ravenous bite out of something too big for you to chew. Something that scares ya. Something you have a true chance of failing and getting your ass handed to you by. Something worthy of dreaming about at night and exhausting yourself in the pursuit of achieving. Aim for the stars and land on the moon type of thing. Find someone to hold you accountable and give you a good slap when you're betraying what is noble and great within you. Get on it, stay on it, and ride that monster into the sky.
Well, for me, TierraMitica has been and always will be a big juicy bite into the mythic. A life of true daring and a path to greatness for my life and future. I chose to return to my home in the jungle and pursue a much greater destiny than what I was envisioning in America. It kindles the wild west frontier vision of new horizons and the possibility of creating something truly unique and revolutionary in the world. Here we are building a utopia, our very own garden of Eden, by programming a new and extraordinary belief system in ourselves rooted in the deepest wisdom of human nature and the obvious embrace of happiness as our primary goal. It's an experiment that proves itself worthy of pursuing every day that we are lucky enough to live it.
We started a new business, Fantasyscaping, as a vehicle to bring our collective artwork and sculpting to market which we can transform into an entirely new industry over time. Resources will inevitably gather and our collective dream here will grow more expansive and impressive as the years go by. And we will thoroughly enjoy the deeply fulfilling work together as a family as we laugh, dance, and sculpt our way into the future. Our flagship project for this year is a fantasy dungeon where the boys will play their roleplaying game every Saturday. Our characters are currently being sculpted into life by the girls and will be set inside the stone castle that we are constructing. There will be goblins, elves, orcs, sorcerers, witches, barbarians, and a giant fire-breathing dragon that will sit atop the castle and breathe real fire, which Mikis, Dorin and I are currently having a blast building.
Constructing this project is my new day job, and it's only the beginning. The sky is truly the limit with the crew here in TierraMitica and you can imagine that we are shooting for the stars with everything that we do. I am dreaming bigger and working hard to create a magnificent life for myself here in the jungle of Peru with my mythic family. There is absolutely nothing mediocre about my direction and the challenges I face daily are helping to shape me into the man that I know I am deep down in my heart. I'm learning how to have fun again, to enjoy the ride I'm on, and to make myself proud. To feel at home and relax in the energy of trust and happiness rather than always having to prove myself in some intense struggle to make myself a better man to become deserving of the life I dream of. I'm proud of my direction, and trust that I will never have to look back at my life and wonder what more I could have experienced, felt, loved, and pushed myself towards.
Yes, it is still possible to exist in the grey, passionless swamp of being less and claiming less from your life than you know in your heart you deserve, even here in the mythic energy of the jungle. Taking myself out of the mediocre and into the mythic involves truly, deeply wanting to change, and having the balls to grab a hold of that steering wheel and steer it towards a life that turns me on and makes me burn with passion at the prospect of creating. Then I choose to hammer down on that vision every day. Some days are mythic, and some days the loser in me gets the best of me. What I can say for sure is I trust my direction. One day at a time.
Maybe there's a mediocre loser hiding in every one of us and maybe lighting a fire under his ass is just what the doctor ordered… Life’s too precious. Shit, we only get one. We have chosen to live a mythic adventure. Might as well figure out what we are truly made of.
