The Boy Who Left and Never Returned

A tale of three young cobblers and what it means to be a character

The Boy Who Left and Never Returned

Once, there was a young boy who lived in a village. The son of a cobbler, he grew up learning the trade and saw the world from the vantage point of a cobbler-to-be. He knew it was his fate to become a cobbler, but he was curious, and he knew that his trade was not the only trade, nor his village the only village.

There was some commerce between villages, though the nearest other town was several days' ride over the hills to the great beyond. From his friend, who was a merchant, the boy heard tales, the gist of which was that things out there were strange.

"They don't have the good sense that they do here," people would say. "Here, things may not be perfect, but we do things right. Or at least, we do our best. Or at least, we do what we can."

When the boy grew up, he said goodbye to his family, gathered his things, and left the village, never to return.

His friend the merchant one day needed to buy some goods to resell, and he traveled over the hills and through the woods to the next town over. There he was surprised to find the cobbler, who had grown into very different type of person than in his youth. Here, he wasn't a cobbler at all; in fact, he was the mayor, and a very different sort of person than the merchant remembered.

Yet it was him all right. The cobbler-mayor recognized the merchant, and the exchange between the two childhood friends was polite and warm. Taken with the strangeness of the encounter, the merchant felt impelled to ask the cobbler-mayor if, after all, he would like to come home now, and the cobbler-mayor said, "Well, maybe someday, but not today."

The merchant reflected on these things during his journey back to town. Later he talked with the boy's parents, telling them their son was alive and doing quite well indeed.

They marveled, not knowing what to make of this. How had a cobbler become a mayor? Is that what happens when a person travels to that town? Perhaps some sudden fortune from his adventure had reshaped him as a person? The merchant was at a loss. Alas, they all conceded that the new village had changed the former cobbler in some way, and they were glad for him, and counted him lucky to have found a good life for himself, though they did not understand it, nor did they believe they had access to such a life themselves.

The best they could decide was that sometimes adventures, like gambling, paid off, and they were grateful that they had good sense, and were not gamblers, and that was that.

The Boy Who Left and Returned

Once, there was a young boy who lived in a village. The son of a cobbler, he grew up learning the trade and saw the world from the vantage point of a cobbler-to-be. He knew it was his fate to become a cobbler, but he was curious, and he knew that his trade was not the only trade, nor his village the only village.

There was some commerce between villages, though the nearest other town was several days' ride over the hills to the great beyond. From his friend, who was a merchant, he heard tales, the gist of which was that things out there were strange.

"They don't have the good sense that they do here," people would say. "Here, things may not be perfect, but we do things right. Or at least, we do our best. Or at least, we do what we can."

When this young boy grew up, he left the village. He journeyed to the next town over, spent some time in the woods and hills.

He discovered a love of fishing which led him to learn everything about fishing—leading him to pursue how to travel by boat down river, which led him to travel one day to the sea.

He saw the big boats there and learned to fish and sail, going for long voyages for many years.

Having traveled to remote islands, he returned at last to his home village, shaped by his travels. He once more took up the craft of cobbling and became a great artisan, styling beautiful shoes informed by his trips around the world.

The Boy Who Never Left

Our story has a third young boy as well, and time affected this young lad as much as the two others. This boy, unlike the two others but very much like the rest of the villagers, decided to stay in the village. He wasn't sure that he was a cobbler, but he understood it to be his trade. He did his trade and went about his days with an equal measure of curiosity as the other two boys had brought to their new pursuits.

People would sometimes tell him that he made very good shoes, and that his father should be very proud. He accepted the praise with gratitude, and an equal measure of curiosity.

Why, he wondered, should his father be proud that his son's shoes were good? His father understood the trade of being a cobbler, but his father was a great deal many other things besides a cobbler. He was a man. He was a father. And who could say what he might become each night when he dreamed? Yes, he was much more than merely a cobbler.

Sometimes people weren't happy with the young cobbler’s shoes, and they called him names and insulted him, that he was not his father's son, or that he should be ashamed. While the young cobbler understood the customer was not happy with their shoes, he didn't feel ashamed. Sometimes to these customers he would apologize and offer to give them free repairs to make good on his error, and sometimes he told them they were never happy and they could go to hell, or at least take their business elsewhere.

Now it should be clear that in this village, a person was supposed to grow up doing what they were conditioned to do. Any deviation from the norm was to be viewed with scorn, and such an errant person should be corrected so that they would quickly be able to resume normal life.

So it may surprise you that for some reason this young boy who never left his village somehow managed to change and evolve just as much as the other two. Son of a cobbler, grew up in a cobbler neighborhood, reared on the values and knowledge that affirmed a cobbler's worldview, and yet one day his friend the merchant noticed the cobbler coming in from the woods near town, hunched and carrying a deer over his shoulder. Somehow his friend the cobbler had become a skilled hunter.

Many mornings and evenings he would go out and hunt, and in a very short time he was earning so much that way that he no longer needed to be a cobbler. Content in his newfound freedom, he devoted himself to the art of reading animal signs and tracks. Out there on a hunt, he felt at one with the wilderness and felt very much a part of the life there. With time, he learned to apply these understandings to himself and people as well—subtle arts of inner knowing. Brought in touch with himself, he learned to see beyond many of the the world’s common delusions and conditioning.

He brought in wild game and was very generous with his catches. People came to see him as something of a wise man—in touch with some mysterious power, able to survive and even thrive on his own out there away from the village.

He lived a good life and spent long stretches of time out in the wilderness until the day came when, very old, he passed away a happy man. The villagers told stories of him for another generation or two, but no more. During the first generation of stories, they referred to him by name—Hunter John. As time passed, he was known only as a strange wise hunter, until at last, all stories of him passed away also.

This Third Type of Villager

Each of these little cobbler tales describes a different model of how people change: leave town and immerse yourself in another culture or pursuit, or follow your bliss and let it take you on adventures. Find something that speaks to you and pursue it. These first two are surefire ways of changing, but they also assume that external change is the primary way of effecting development. They tend to prioritize the importance of achievement.

I tend to agree with this. When in a rut, change something. Go get fed. Grab something new that speaks to you. If you love something, get good at it.

But what's interesting is that it's also possible to draw upon inner resources. What the third guy shows is that inner resources exist. They seem mysterious to the villagers because the change the cobbler goes through can't be attributed to some obvious catalyst.

"He's living in Village B, where things are peculiar, that's bound to give a guy unusual ideas."

"Oh, it's a far, wide world out there; for those who are able to see it, it's bound to make them different from you and me."

I’m interested in what we lose when we mistake the real change a person goes through for the external thing that they are doing.

"Oh, there must be something about fishing that brings about growth; maybe I need to learn fishing."

"I should leave town if I want to become mayor."

"Hunting is a holy path."

It may be more arbitrary than we realize. It happens to be pottery, but it could just as well be kitesurfing. What matters is the change that it brings about. The proof is in the pudding.

Main Characters and NPCs

There's a meme about NPCs—non-player characters. In video games, these are the background figures programmed with limited responses and behaviors that lack the depth and agency of player-controlled characters. The meme suggests that some people move through life on autopilot, and react with predictable patterns, are unaware of their conditioning, and lack individual thought or purpose. It's a way of distinguishing between those who are deemed to be awake to their own lives and those who simply follow pre-programmed social scripts.

As a writer, I am granted license to dwell overmuch about character—generally this means being fascinated by how to convey the sense of a person’s individuality in descriptions and gestures and how they interact with the stuff that they encounter in a story. But I’m also fascinated about how we curate our personalities and believe we are them.

Chekhov was a master at a style of succinct omniscient description of a character.

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he was. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, stately and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual.

from The Lady with the Dog

In just a few lines, we understand this man's life circumstances and the distance in his marriage.

With all this focus on characters and an understanding that personality is artificial and an unreliable measure of a person’s essence, what's strange to me is that nevertheless, even for writers, we all still basically think ourselves the main character in our story. In the monomythic sense, it's sort of true from our own perspective, and probably empowering, but there's a lot of nonsense built into that as well—it pits a person person versus the world and disposes some “heroes” to believe that the world who doesn’t affirm them might simply consist of NPCs.

When I’m able, I prefer to think of myself as a character, so that I have some separation from my perspective. Who is this guy? Am I the narrator? If so, am I reliable? What’s he up to? Anything at all is bound to happen.

If I'm the main character and the hero, there's a script for me to follow, and in the end, I'm going to conquer, following the standard model. But if it's a standard model, where's the real conquest?

I think the third cobbler shows us another way—finding adventure and transformation by drawing on his inner resources and being curious about the world around him, making his own path right where he stands, developing inner resources that appear mysterious to those who believe change must come from the outside. Maybe the truest conquest is over our own conditioning, wherever we happen to be.