“Follow your bliss.”

That phrase has been stuck in my head since I first heard the scholar Joseph Campbell utter it 30-plus years ago during one of Bill Moyers’ PBS interviews.

MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?
CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time––namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.

Whenever I set out to write a profile-style column (if 900 words can really qualify as a “profile”), subjects of that column sometimes ask why I’ve chosen them. The actor Jefferson Russell did so a couple of weeks ago over lunch at Kay’s Place in central Baltimore. (Russell spent four years a Baltimore cop before setting out on a stage career.)

“Because I admire people who follow their bliss,” I’ll say.

I still struggle a bit with Campbell’s phrasing: Did he mean “find” your bliss? Did he mean “discover” your bliss? I’ve decided that he meant follow your heart, trust your instincts, be courageous, take a risk, things will work out. They certainly did for Jefferson Russell.

My weekend column on Jefferson Russell can be found at this gifted link to followers of this blog.