THE HERO’S JOURNEY IS KINDA FUN No one is born a pro. You’ve got to fall before you hit bottom, and sometimes that fall can be a hell of a ride. So here’s to blackouts and divorces, to lost jobs and lost cash and lost self-respect. Here’s to time on the street. Here’s to years we can’t remember. Here’s to bad friends and cheating spouses — and to us, too, for being at times both. Turning Pro, p. 16 As excruciating as we choose to make Act Two for our heroes, it should also be fun. Did you ever see the English movie Withnail and I, written and directed by Bruce Robinson, based on his own crazy life in London during the late 1960s? The two eponymous friends, played by Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann, part at the end, never to see each other again (we assume). But the intensity of their shared journey has made them closer than brothers, and each has stamped his impress on the other more profoundly than any other, before or since.

Sometimes we cannot see any connection between our suffering and our sin, but this connection definitely exists.

“I was repaid with evil for the goodness which I have done.” But if you love those for whom you did good, then you have already received your reward.

Therefore, all that you do with love, you do for yourself.

The reward for virtue is the understanding of the good deed.

—MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

Look for the causes of the evil from which you suffer in yourself.

Sometimes this evil is the direct consequence of your activity; sometimes it happens after a lengthy period of transformation of an evil which you committed long ago.

But the source is always in you, and salvation from it lies in changes in your actions, your way of life.