The chambered nautilus, both in its structure and its behavior, illustrates how we should navigate the journeys in our lives.
Envisioning the Hero’s Journey
I’ve studied and taught the Hero’s Journey for more than 40 years. During that time, I’ve used a number of analogies to illustrate the journey’s psychological process. One of the best of these is the analogy between the Hero’s Journey and the chambered nautilus. The chambered nautilus, both in its structure and its behavior, illustrates the process we go through as we navigate the journeys in our lives.
The chambered nautilus is cephalopod, related to squids and octopuses. It is the only cephalopod with an external skeleton. Its shell is divided into compartments or chambers. The nautilus lives only in the largest chamber. As its body outgrows that chamber, it moves forward, creating a new chamber and sealing off the old chambers.
The nautilus cannot discard the old chambers. Rather, it uses the old chambers to survive by pumping gas and fluids in and out of them to maintain its buoyancy and allow it to hover upright in the water. It’s the nautilus’ ability to adjust its old chambers for survival that makes it important to us in the context of the Hero’s Journey.
“Restorying” Our Lives
To make meaning in life is to create dynamic narratives that render sensible and coherent the seeming chaos of human existence. To fail in this effort of mythmaking is to experience the malaise and stagnation that come with an insufficient narration of human life.
Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By
Just as the nautilus cannot cast off its old chambers, we cannot cast off the events and experiences in our lives. They remain a part of who we are. However, like the nautilus, we can “adjust” the significance and meaning of those events. We can reinterpret negative events or update positive events so that they help us remain “buoyant and upright” in the present.
In a sense, our lives are a “narrative nautilus.” We build a narrative or story about ourselves and live in that story until we outgrow it or until life disrupts it in some way. Then we undertake a journey build a new story. The raw elements of the old story stay with us, but we selectively reconstruct their meaning so that they fit the story that we have become or the story we want to be.
Regularly reinterpreting events from our past to make them coherent with our present is essential to a healthy, engaged life. In Your Mythic Journey, psychologist and philosopher Sam Keen tells us, “To remain vibrant throughout a lifetime we must always be inventing ourselves, weaving new themes into our life-narratives, remembering our past, re-visioning our future, reauthorizing the myth by which we live.”
When the Hero’s Journey Calls
The call is the beginning of a journey. It often reaches a person on the edge of a familiar life situation, where he might be unexpectedly touched by signs or encounters of a so-far unknown and hidden world.
Friedamann Wieland, The Journey of the Hero
What are the signals or “Calls” that tell us we are ready to build a new life story? Sometimes the Call is subtle: a vague state of restlessness, constriction, sadness, confusion, frustration or a yearning for “something more.” Sometimes it is more dramatic, as when outside forces rock our lives or when we suffer loss or tragedy: divorce, the death of someone close, the loss of a job, or a serious illness. No matter how it arrives, however, the Call tells us that one chapter in our life has ended and a new one has begun.
When this shift in narrative happens, we need to step back and find a broader, more compassionate perspective of our lives and ourselves. From this enlarged perspective, we will be able to see new possibilities and opportunities that can redirect and re-energize our story. As Jean Houston tells us in The Search for the Beloved, “Your work is clear. It is not to change the story, for this is to deny it; [your work] is, rather, to expand and deepen the story, thus releasing the energy bound within it.”
Although revising our story can be complicated and painful, remembering the lesson of the chambered nautilus can help. We cannot, and should not, try to forget events from our past. Those experiences, reinterpreted and updated, can teach us and expand our perspective. Then, just as the nautilus uses its old chambers to stay buoyant and upright, we can recapture experiences so that they guide and strengthen us for our journeys ahead.
References
Houston, J. (1987). In Search of the Beloved: Journeys in mythology and sacred psychology (1st ed.). New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam.
Keen, S. & Valley-Fox, A. (1973, 1989). Your Mythic Journey: Finding meaning in your life through writing and storytelling. Los Angeles: Jeremey Tharcher.
McAdams, D. (1993). The Stories We Live By: Personal myths and the making of the self. New York: Guilford.
Wieland, F. (1991). The Journey of the Hero: Personal growth, deep ecology and the quest for the Grail (1st ed.). Dorset, England: Prism.