The need to get away

Story archetypes:
1. Overcoming the monster (see April 26 post)
2. Rags to Riches (see April 30 post)
3. The Quest (see May post)
4. Voyage and Return (this post)
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

The need to get away
In the best-selling book Eat, Pray, Love, a woman travels to Italy, India, and then to Indonesia, three continents removed from her New York City residence. She gets there by falling down a modern rabbit hole—a nasty divorce. Away from her ex-husband and their suburban home, this woman learns Italian, eats a lot of pasta, sits for months in an ashram, studies with a Balinese healer, and takes on a passionate lover. Eventually, she comes back home. But what has really happened during this, or any other, Voyage and Return tale? As readers, we want to know the point of the whole thing? What did she learn? How did her life change as a result?

Not all Voyage and Return tales satisfy our need for a lesson and a life change. Some tales, such as Gulliver’s Travels or Peter Rabbit, stay focused on describing a strange world with strange creatures. The main character is often just an observer, watching how the odd people or creatures behave in this strange land. Such tales end with the main characters returning magically to their prior reality, often barely escaping a Mr. McGregor or the Lilliputians or some other twisted villain. The story seems limited to the thrill of the final escape coupled with the relief of being back home.

But the heart of any Voyage and Return tale is to return home and know the place for the first time. By venturing into the foreign, the odd, the unusual, we seek perspective. A Voyage and Return moment in your life can be as simple as going to see a movie where strange things happen and the characters escape versions of doom in thrilling ways (I can’t imagine anything stranger than the Las Vegas portrayed in the new movie, The Hangover). It can be reading through someone’s Facebook page or escaping for a couple of days into (one of my favorites) a Candace Bushnell novel. It’s like looking away from the page, so that when you return your glance to your own life, you see a little more of what goes on in your own daily reality.

These tricks of perception are necessary because of how the human brain takes short-cuts. As soon as we encounter an experience similar to something we’ve already encountered, the brain fires up a select group of neurons and starts shaping our expectations. Take the gorilla movie for example (google Davies Gorilla Movie to watch it yourself).

In graduate school, I watched a video of two groups of people, half in white shirts, half in black shirts, passing a basketball back and forth. Those of us watching the video were told to count how many times the people in white shirts passed the basketball. A bounce pass counted as a pass, but just a bounce did not. The whole class watched. Some of us counted 16 passes, others were sure there were 17 passes, but then the instructor asked how many of us had seen the gorilla. The gorilla? I obviously hadn’t seen it. So we watched the video again, and this time, because my attention wasn’t focused so intently on counting basketball passes, I saw a man in a gorilla suit walk out into the middle of the people passing the basketball, beat on his chest a few times, and walk off in the opposite direction. There was a gorilla in that video, yet had someone told me about the gorilla before I watched it a second time, I wouldn’t have believed it.

Psychologists call this “inattentional blindness.” We don’t see what we’re not looking for. The Voyage and Return tale offers one way to restore sight. We need to find ways to head down a rabbit hole or sneak into Mr. McGregor’s garden and have what we thought was true turned upside down for awhile. Then, hopefully, when we return, it’s with a broader, more balanced perspective.