"A mythic life is not a banking transaction."

"A mythic life is not a banking transaction."
I hear people judging their lives as if they were a retail exchange--like, it should be equitable. We make an effort and we should get a good return.
Or as if our lives were like a skin-care regime:
we should be able to show good results.

Even some spiritual teachers imply (or say) that you should be able to recognize if someone is (you are) 'enlightened'.
But can you?
I think it's far weirder than that.

I told Mr Furniture once that he was a genius artist.
"Then why am I here?" he said (meaning working for minimum wage in the armpit of the city).

I was surprised that this outlaw took worldly judgement as any kind of valid reflection of himself.
"You KNOW the world doesn't judge fairly!" I said.

What if we look at our lives in mythic terms?
What if they aren't measurable, but magical?
In fairy stories, things are often disguised, maybe the opposite of what they appear.
Good skin is not the marker.

I'd been talking with a friend about feeling older & wiser, and the friend was saying they weren't sure they were---that they'd done some things that maybe "set back their personal growth".

I got thinking, there's a vocabulary of judgment and worth in common use that sounds more like financial investment terms than terms that could best describe a human life.
I've complained about terms such as "self-care" before--they sound as if our souls just need a bubble bath.

But that's not the only vocabulary we have.
In myths and fairy tales and religions, a soul might find itself in a muddy swamp or a desolate desert, turned into a frog, or fed by crows, and required to perform an impossible task or to recognize a tempting offer as a trick.
_____
Myth full of pain and failure reassure me, but not when it gets happified into refrigerator magnets and marketing schemes.

 I like this Frida Kahlo mural on a business near the thrift store.
But look--she's almost Disneyfied.
She's smiling, for instance, which she never is in her self-portraits, and they leave off her mustache, which she proudly included. She looks almost plump and healthy, which she certainly wasn't.

I'm not objecting to this mural. I have a carrying bag with Vincent van Gogh's sunflowers. I'm just saying human lives don't need to be a constantly rising line on a graph of improvement.
It's weirder than that.