Three friends move across a forbidding landscape. Danger could appear anytime. They do not know what to expect or exactly what path to take, but they know that everything depends on their success. They need to save something – their town, their family, the world, each other, something.

It could be one hero traveling alone. He could have a sidekick.

It could be the Odyssey, The Three Musketeers, Blade Runner or Harry Potter. But that’s the premise for a compelling story.

And that is the premise for a compelling life too.

Children sit in the audience of the theatre or read the book or listen to the voice of someone reading the story to them and they are transported and filled with a longing to live that story out. To feel that challenge, that sense of purpose, that sense that their life and their actions are that important, and that the fellowship in which they find themselves is an unbreakable bond of affection and respect that will sustain them throughout their adventure and their life.

That is how we long to live which is why we love that kind of story.

Our habit of mind is structured the same way as that story. We place ourselves at the center of the drama of our life and world. We seek association of like minded others. We divide the world between what we want to get and what we want to eliminate. We move across the landscape of our lives to get what we want.

So the story fits our understanding of the shape of the world.

An ideal Buddhist, a bodhisattva, has six things they need to do. These are the way they save beings and follow their path to Buddhahood. The six are generosity, ethical and moral conduct, not getting angry, joyful effort, meditation, and wisdom. The idea of joyful effort is at the heart of the success of the story. It is the engine that drives it forward.

This bodhisattva, like the characters in the story, does not sit passively on a pillow.  They act. They act vigorously and they are into it. That is “joyful effort.”  It makes the story urgent and it makes our lives fulfilling and useful.

The social status of the character could be high or low. Henry V or Oliver Twist.   Their sex life can range from Don Juan's to Don Quixote's. What matters to the story is their effort, and the urgency of their mission.

If you know that behind a door is a family held hostage, that negotiations have stopped and shots have been fired, as you hit the door with 20 of your closest friends, who have trained together for this moment and moments like it for months or years, who you know you can depend on, who know they can depend on you, in the knowledge that your cause is just and that lives depend on your skill and determination, then you will have a feeling of having a life that matters. Because it does.

If you hold in your arms someone who is dying, who has been sick for a long time, who has no one close to them, who smells bad, and they look up at you with a question, a question of why are you being kind to me, you can have that feeling too. It will be real.

There are no limits to the ways to achieve this or the number of us who can do it.

At a karate training this week with hundreds of people from around the world coming together to see old friends and to get new knowledge and to share their lives of training with each other you could see in the movement and the faces of the people their urgency and sincerity in practice. There were nurses and teachers there, and cops and military people, and people from all walks of life who were aiming their lives.

Some, maybe all, would put their effort and skill into the service of the people they would come in contact with in the months and years ahead. They might pull someone from a burning car, or inspire a student to work hard and succeed, have the vision to lead their company well, or to make good choices when the people around them need a peer to be a leader.

The opportunity to take skillful, risky action on behalf of other people moves us to a higher way of life. That is what makes it “an honor” to serve. That is not just a figure of speech or a boast. Making joyful effort as a bodhisattva or a public servant or a citizen, professional or family member, is what honor is.

To deprive people of this opportunity disables them, harms society and prevents us from fulfilling what is our deepest, most noble and most human aspiration.

When public policy is set to deprive working people of the value of their work and redistribute it to non working financiers or lifetime public assistance recipients then the humanity of all the people involved is reduced.

When public policy makes effort seem useless or equal to no effort, when skill is degraded and equal to lack of skill, when a mature ethic of self reliance and public service is denigrated and an infantile impulse to complain is rewarded, when honest people are prevented from acting in self defense and predators rights are privileged then we have a waste of human capital that exceeds whatever number we pick to estimate our national debt.

This circumstance places us right at the center of the story of our own life. If this is the inhospitable terrain in which we find ourselves, let’s move across it boldly and skillfully. Let’s join together with a few friends, or a few hundred, or a few million and get where we need to go, save who we need to save, never forget the urgency of our mission and never look back.