Why your life is a hero's journey (and how to recognize the call)

This week, in thousands of homes, someone is waking up early with papers already prepared on the living room table. On Monday, September 14, booking opens for the Imserso trips: 879,213 spots for this season, and over four and a half million people accredited to apply for them. The coast, the islands, the getaways. There will be busy phone lines, agencies with lines at the door, and more than one affectionate debate over whether to choose Benidorm or Mojácar. Spain is, whatever anyone says, a country of older adults who travel.

This article is about a journey that does not appear in that catalog. It has no dates, no hotel, and no one can book it for you. It has been told since before Homer, and the first stage of the Thenomba Senior journey is carried in its subtitle. With this piece, we open a new series of the Notebook: the twelve stages of the journey, commented on one by one, slowly. We begin with the first, Find your purpose, and with the moment upon which everything else depends: the calling.

The man who found the same tale everywhere

In 1949, a literature professor named Joseph Campbell published a strange book titled The Hero with a Thousand Faces. He had spent years reading myths from traditions that had never touched one another—Greek, Polynesian, Arthurian, Native American—and believed he saw the same skeleton in all of them. An ordinary person receives a call. They hesitate. They cross a threshold that takes them out of their known world. They face trials, find allies and mentors. And they return home transformed, bringing something that their community needs. Campbell called it the monomyth; the world knows it as the hero's journey.

Of that scheme, and of how it has been read since the sixties, we have already spoken in this Notebook. What we did not do then was pause at the first square, which is the one we must face now. Because everything else—the threshold, the trials, the return—depends on an earlier, quieter moment, which in stories lasts a paragraph and in life can last years: realizing that something is calling.

The call does not arrive by letter

In stories, the call is loud. A letter arrives, a wizard appears at the door, a ship docks in the port. In real life, there is almost never a wizard. The call, after a certain age, looks more like this: you finish cleaning up the kitchen at ten in the morning and the day opens up before you like an excessively long hallway. Or you answer "good, everything's good" for the third time in a week and realize, as you say it, that it is not a lie, but it is not the whole truth either. Or someone asks you what you would do if you were twenty years younger, and you are surprised not by the question, but by the speed with which something inside you answers. Of that restlessness, when it arrives earlier, we have already written here.

Stage 1 of the Senior journey condenses all of that into a six-word question: what moves me right now? Not what you are supposed to do, nor what others expect, nor what you did for forty years. What moves you, today, specifically. It is an uncomfortable question precisely because for decades there was no need to ask it: work, home, and children answered on their own.

It is worth saying something before moving on: that restlessness is not a malfunction. It does not need to be cured, nor covered up with activities like someone masking a noise with the radio. In the language of the journey, that restlessness is information. It is a life's way of warning that there is still life left to be decided.

What psychology calls narrative identity

Here one might object that all of this is literature. Fair enough. Let us look at what the research says.

For more than three decades, psychologist Dan McAdams of Northwestern University has studied something he calls narrative identity: the internalized and constantly revised life story with which each person integrates their reconstructed past and imagined future to give their life a sense of unity and purpose. In 2013, alongside Kate McLean, he summarized in Current Directions in Psychological Science what that field has found. Two results are of interest here. First: telling oneself one's own story is one of the central ways human beings manufacture meaning—not an ornament, but the loom where meaning is woven. Second: people who, when narrating their lives, find lessons in adversity and portray themselves as agents—as someone who decides, not just someone to whom things happen—exhibit, on average, better mental health and greater maturity.

And now the nuance, because in this Notebook nuances are told in full: the authors themselves acknowledge that the causal direction remains open. Perhaps narrating oneself better helps to live better; perhaps those who are better narrate better; probably both feed into each other. It is a robust association, not a recipe. No one can promise you anything for writing your life, and if anyone promises you otherwise, be suspicious.

The counterpoint: folklorists do not buy the monomyth

Let us be equally honest about Campbell. In academia, his framework has serious critics. Folklorist Barre Toelken argued that Campbell was only able to construct his monomyth by citing the tales that fit the mold he had already conceived, leaving out the thousands that did not. Alan Dundes, one of the most cited folklorists of the 20th century, was harsher: he considered the Campbellian archetype an amateurish concept that has harmed the serious study of folklore. And Maureen Murdock pointed out in 1990 that the entire scheme is constructed through a masculine lens: the hero who goes out to conquer the world is a script that simply does not fit many women of your generation, who balanced homes, jobs, and caregiving all at once.

There is one more nuance, and it is the one that matters most: no life owes anyone a narrative arc. There are splendid lives that do not have three acts, a threshold, or a triumphant return; there are years that are plateaus, and they are not empty because of it. If one day the story does not turn out perfectly, the defect is not in your life: it is in the mold.

So, why do we use this scheme? Because the hero's journey is not a law of nature: it is a lens. And lenses are not judged by whether they are true, but by what they allow us to see. This one allows us to see three things that culture usually denies to your age: that there can be a call, that there can be a path, and that what has been learned asks to be passed on.

The journey of integration

We said it when talking about the hero's journey at 70 and it is worth repeating here, because it is the key to this entire series that begins: the journey undertaken at this age is not the journey of youth. That was a journey of conquest—heading out, making a name, accumulating. This is a journey of integration: revisiting what has been lived, putting it in order, understanding what it means, and placing an experience that no one else has at the service of something that matters.

That is why Stage 1 does not start by asking you for projects. It starts by asking you for a perspective: the life lived on one side, the life that continues on the other, and you in the middle, with your map of values and your questions. There are personal biography exercises, there are conversations with people who have reinvented their direction at this age, and there is a travel journal where the thread is noted down. It is the program starting where it must start: by knowing what moves you, before deciding where to go.

How to respond to a call

No solemn decision is required. Real calls are answered with small, concrete gestures. Jotting down, for example: any ordinary notebook and ten minutes, two or three times a week, writing about what moved you and what left you indifferent. After a month, that notebook knows more about you than many conversations do. Conversing, too: not with just anyone, but with someone capable of asking you serious questions and listening to the entire answer. And choosing a threshold suited to your measure: resuming what you left behind, reading with a plan, signing up for something that demands a little more than what is comfortable.

And yes: book the catalog trip too, if you feel like it. May it be a good week for both things. Only, while you wait for confirmation from the agency, perhaps it is worth listening inward for a moment. The other booking—the one for the journey that has carried your name for a long time—has no deadline, no limit, and no one else can make it for you. But it also opens this week. It opens, in reality, any week you decide to answer the call.

Cover image generated with artificial intelligence.