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The mentor

White hair. Equally as white of a beard. The image of the wise and aged mentor, a person with a life lived long and richly, with experience and trials and terrors overcome. The mentor is one of the strongest archetypes in our stories and one that that is found through every stage of a person’s life, from a parent’s hand guiding the first steps to a nurse’s final closing of our eyelids as we leave this life in death and peace. 

The mentor, may it be a man or women, young or old, weak or strong, serves as the hero’s guidepost and anchor into the unknown. The adventure, a world dark and mysterious to the hero’s previous comfort of living, becomes the hero’s world, and it is the mentor that initiates the hero into the first steps of this world. The mentor is only there to teach how to stand, the hero must walk on his own. The hero must step onto the path by themselves. The mentor’s greatest asset is the token of his experience, the knowledge accumulated and now shared with the hero. 

Once instilled, and taught to the hero, the mentor retreats and goes on his own path, for he has his own story to live. The mentor is never fully invested, never fully committed to the hero. A great guide, but never a bearer of burden. That is the mentor.