What The Odyssey taught me

With Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in theaters right now, I've been thinking a lot about the original story and what it actually teaches us. I won't spoil anything from the film, but I do want to talk about Homer's poem, because it's almost three thousand years old and somehow still feels like it was written about the life we’re living right now.

The basic setup is this: a man named Odysseus, the King of Ithaca, spends twenty years away from home. Ten at war, ten trying to get back. Along the way he faces things that should have destroyed him. Monsters, gods, temptations, impossible choices, and the slow loss of everything he started with. His ships, his crew, his certainty that the world would cooperate with his plans. By the time he reaches home, he's a completely different person than the one who left.

And I think that's the part of the story that matters most. Not the monsters or the magic. The transformation. Odysseus leaves as a man who believes he can outsmart anything, and he comes back as someone who has learned, the hard way, that the world doesn't bend to your will. That getting where you want to go takes longer than you think, costs more than you planned, and changes you in ways you didn't expect. And that the change itself is the real point of the journey.

The Stoics loved this story. Zeno, who founded Stoicism, wrote five books about Homer. Seneca called Odysseus a wise man who couldn't be conquered by effort or seduced by pleasure. Musonius Rufus, who was himself exiled by the Roman emperor, looked at Odysseus and saw proof that losing everything can actually make you stronger. They saw in him the living example of their philosophy: accept what you can't control, fight for what you can, and let the journey shape you into someone worth being.

There are a few things from the Odyssey that I keep coming back to in my own life. The first is that endurance matters more than talent. Odysseus survives not because he's the strongest or the fastest but because he refuses to stop. Twenty years is a long time to keep going without a guarantee that any of it will pay off, and he does it anyway. That kind of persistence, the kind that doesn't need a promise of success to keep showing up, is something I think about whenever the road I'm on feels longer than I expected.

The second is that the journey changes you more than the destination ever could. The Greek poet Cavafy wrote a famous poem about this called "Ithaca," where he says you should pray the road is long, full of adventure and discovery, because without the journey you'd arrive the same person who left and arriving unchanged means arriving empty.

And the third is something that I think connects to everything we've been talking about in this newsletter for months. Odysseus is offered a way out. A comfortable, painless, eternal way out. And he turns it down because the life waiting for him back home, imperfect and uncertain and mortal as it is, is his. He chooses purpose over comfort. And that single choice is the one that makes him worth remembering three thousand years later.

Your journey probably doesn't involve monsters or gods. But it involves endurance, and change, and the temptation to settle for something easier than the thing you actually want. The Odyssey is a reminder that the hard road is usually the right one, and that who you become on it matters more than when you arrive.

The road continues next Monday.

See you in my next one.

P.S. If someone you know is in the middle of their own long journey right now, send this to them. Sometimes the thing someone needs is to hear that the road is supposed to be this hard.

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The Stoic Road