"The Continuous Life" by Mark Strand

In the wonderful interview series "The Power of Myth" with Joseph Campbell and Bill Moyers, which we've discussed here, Campbell describes the state of the Protagonist at the beginning of many stories as being one of "discomfort." There's something unsettled in their life - and they are either aware of discomfort or they are doing what they can to repress / suppress their roiling emotions 'inside.'

Here's a great poem that seems to describe a Protagonist in Act I, sitting right at the pivot point between openly acknowledging their discomfort with their 'ordinary life' or pushing away from the call of adventure and retreating into the lie they are living. The poem is written by Mark Strand, former Pulitzer Prize winner, Fulbright scholar, and former Poet Laureate. You can buy his book here.

The Continuous Life

by Mark Strand

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children hunched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? O parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost—a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don't really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.