The wonderful writer and anthropologist Joseph Campbell devoted a lifetime of study to showing that every culture in the world has a similar way of telling the stories that we pour into myths, fables, novels, or, more recently, movies and television series. In these stories, an ordinary person, who lives a normal life in a world apparently devoid of magic, one day hears a subtle call to do things differently, an invitation to action, to adventure. It is something like if one summer day you are resting in a garden chair. You have your eyes closed and you are between boredom and reverie. Suddenly you hear a thud in the distance. Is it the neighbor's motorcycle, which always parks in front of your door? Is it the delivery truck? Or could it not be distant thunder that heralds a storm? If it is a storm, will the garden chairs have to be entered? Will your son who is returning home be lost? Will we have to go looking for him by car? And the freshly laid laundry?
What are you going to do with it, if there is no place to hang it indoors? You quickly decide no, that the noise was not important. You relax, but after a few seconds everything darkens, the thunder comes closer, a bright lightning bolt falls and the sky begins to rain. Your chairs, your laundry, your child, everything is hopelessly soaked!
Instead of that distant thunder on a summer dusk, imagine now that what you heard that day was a comment that your boss dropped that the company was bad and that they did not know how long they would hold ... Or your partner said in passing that she would like to be a mother, but you resisted talking about it ... Or maybe a friend forgot to call you on your birthday. Any one of those signs could herald another storm, a change in your life, something to come, a job loss, the arrival of a child, or the betrayal of a friend. They are the signs of what is to come, a call to adventure, to change ... We can accept that call or decline it.
In universal fables, inexorably, if the person declines the call to adventure, fate will insist again with another more forceful sign. It may be King Hermés encouraging a depressed Odysseus to build a ship and set sail for Ithaca; the green knight, interrupting the celebration of King Arthur's court to challenge Arthur; Harry Potter, plucked from his gray life with his adoptive parents by Voldemort; Ben Kenobi in Star Wars, helping to train Anakin and Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Force; Neo, the hero of the Matrix, an apparently ordinary boy who receives the strange order to "follow the rabbit"; the young Alice, bored under a tree, who falls through a hole and enters an extraordinary world; Spider-Man, a lonely orphan who discovers he has magical powers "that carry great responsibility"; or children evacuated by a bombardment, who arrive through a magical closet into the world of Narnia ... There are countless examples: throughout the centuries, and in any corner of the world, these literary characters go from normal lives to a life of adventure ... Circumstances will force an ordinary person to arm themselves with courage and go out to face a fearsome enemy, a dragon, an evil villain or a dark force, determined to annihilate what matters most to them.
In our daily lives, no one forces us to adapt to circumstances. Sometimes it is easier to get stuck than to face these life challenges. There are so many excuses for this: low self-esteem; the laziness of starting a battle; the fear of losing; Some older parents who would miss us if we go to live in another country; a couple with whom we share little, but who have our loyalty; a boring job, but it pays the bills at the end of the month.