A POST FROM MICHAEL SELLARS

My friend Michael Sellars posted this today at his Substack, “A Deeper Look.” I’m republishing it here because I think what he has to say is important for everyone.

TC

How Homer’s Odyssey Helped Give Meaning to a Young Man’s Life -- Mine.

On Friday, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey opened in theaters and the buzz is considerable — 95% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this morning. I’ll see it. But this weekend I’ve found that the buzz over Nolan’s film has triggered thoughts about the story that inspired it—and deeper thoughts about the role that story has played in my own life. This is one of those things I have to write about, otherwise I won’t stop thinking about it. Thank you for allowing me a personal induldgence.

***

I was twenty-one years old, a senior at the University of Delaware, pursuing a minor in classics that required spending an entire semester reading Homer’s Odyssey in the original Greek.

That made it my daily companion for half a year. Day after day, I journeyed with Odysseus. Circe, sirens, Scylla and Charybdis, Polyphemus, all of them.

We had spent the previous semester reading the Iliad, so by then the whole Homeric world had become familiar: Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Penelope, Telemachus, the gods, the war, and finally the long voyage home.

I never quite understood Achilles. He was magnificent, of course, but too consumed by honor, too quick to anger, too often imprisoned by wounded pride. Homer himself gives us the unforgettable image of Achilles sulking in his tent while others fought and died.

Odysseus was different.

He wasn’t the strongest man in Greece. He was arguably the wisest. Resourceful. Patient. Curious. Adaptable. He survived because he could think as well as fight. It was Odysseus who conceived the Trojan Horse when brute force had failed. He wasn’t simply a warrior. He was an explorer of both the world and the human condition.

A modern Greek poet, Constantin Cavafy, wrote Ithaka in 1910, and when I discovered that poem, somewhere between Homer and Cavafy, something clicked. I came to believe that Odysseus’s voyage wasn’t merely an ancient adventure story. It was a way of understanding life itself. I was an aspiring singer-songwriter then, and inspired by Homer and Cavafy, I wrote a song that immediately became my personal anthem. More than fifty years later, it still is. Here are the lyrics:

1
On the day you start your journey
Pray that the way is long
Full of hope, full of dreams
In the cool gray light of dawn

Take a look around you 
Let your spirit set you free
Let your mind hold the standard
Upon your odyssey

And pray that the way is long
That the summer mornings last
That the candles of your future
Gently melt into your past

2
Mother of pearl, amber and ebony
Many are the treasures that are there for you to see
Always keep before you the Island as your goal
Ithaka awaits you, and as you’re growing old

Hold on to your journey 
Let it last until you’re grey
Let the sea run smooth below you
As it sends you on your way

3
And though you find the island poor
The knowledge that you’ve gained
Says that you belong to her
Though somehow you’ve both changed

Now you’ve come to understand
Just what the island means
It was she who sent you on the way
And answered all your dreams

Look back on your journey
Think of everywhere you’ve been 
Thank her for your wisdom
You’d do it all again

And pray that the way long
That the summer mornings last
That the candles of your future
Gently melt . . into . . . your past

I wrote those words without the faintest idea what my own odyssey would become. To be honest, about all I knew then was what my life was not going to be. It wasn’t going to be a straight line from graduation to a steady job, a house in the suburbs, and a life devoted above all to stability. Please don’t get me wrong — I have enormous respect for people who find fulfillment in that path. My respect for that has only grown over the years. It’s a completely reasonable, valid, honorable choice. It just wasn’t going to be my choice. I knew that much.

Something in me was always drawn toward the horizon.

I dont think it just means travel.

I think it means transformation.

So I really did set out on a wandering journey that carried me into places that the young man who wrote those lyrics could never have imagined. I found myself living in the mountains of Ethiopia, where the landscape felt almost biblical in its age and grandeur. I made a film in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. Another film in the Cradle of Humankind in South Africa, where the story wasn’t simply about a movie but about standing where our earliest human ancestors once walked. Years in Poland, Moscow, the Philippines. Eventually I would marry my princess in the green highlands of Kenya, a place that has now become part of my family’s story forever.

The real treasures weren’t geographic.

They were the people.

The conversations that changed my thinking. The cultures that challenged assumptions I didn’t even know I held. The realization that dignity has very little to do with wealth. The discovery that courage, kindness, humor, faith, and love look remarkably similar no matter what language people speak.

When I hear the line,

“Mother of pearl, amber and ebony, many are the treasures that are there for you to see…”

I no longer think of jewels.

I think of the richness of human experience.

That isn’t to say the journey came without cost.

It didn’t.

I’ve made mistakes—some painful ones. It took me three marriages to finally get it right. I’ve blundered. There were times when my ambitions and my desire to follow the next adventure pulled me away from people who deserved more of me, including my own children when they were young, and there are wounds from that, some healed, some not. Some dreams never became what I imagined they would become. Others arrived in forms I never could have predicted. I experienced more than I accomplished, and am still trying to get that balance right.

So regrets are real.

But so is the gratitude.

As a young man, I assumed the measure of a successful life would be achievement, and it was seeking some type of achievement that set me out on the jorney. And yes, achievement matters. I have never stopped striving.

But somewhere along the way I began to understand that achievement is only one measure of a life—a worthy goal, but not the only one.

Experience is another.

Curiosity is another.

Resilience.

Wonder.

The willingness to begin again after failure.

Trusting yourself to step into unfamiliar worlds and allow them to change you.

Perhaps that’s why Odysseus has stayed with me all these years.

He doesn’t endure because his journey is easy.

He endures because, despite shipwrecks, heartbreak, loss, temptation, and failure, he never stops moving toward home.

***

As I enter what must surely be the final leg of my own journey, I find myself returning not only to Homer, but to the words from that little anthem I wrote more than fifty years ago:

“Pray that the way is long…”

At twenty-one, I thought I understood what that meant.

Now I think I understand it differently.

A long journey is not simply a collection of adventures. Nor is it measured by passport stamps, exotic destinations, or colorful stories. One can travel the world and return home essentially unchanged.

The journey matters because of what it does to the traveler.

It introduces us to people whose lives challenge our assumptions. It confronts us with beauty and suffering, success and failure, love and loss. It forces us to see the world through other eyes—and eventually, if we are paying attention, to see ourselves through other eyes as well.

That is the real treasure.

Not simply seeing new places, but becoming a different person because you have seen them.

Perhaps that is why The Odyssey has spoken to readers for nearly three thousand years. Beneath the monsters, the shipwrecks, the gods, and the adventure lies a deeper truth. It is not really the story of a man trying to get home. It is the story of a man who cannot become the person he is meant to be without leaving home, enduring hardship, making mistakes, resisting temptation, and allowing the journey itself to transform him.

I think that’s what Cavafy understood. Ithaka is more than an island. It is the reason to set sail.

We all have our own Ithaka.

Whatever first calls us out into the world—a dream, a calling, a career, a love, an idea, or simply an insatiable curiosity—it serves a purpose beyond the destination itself. It gives us the opportunity to encounter the world in all its richness, and to let those encounters shape who we become.

The older I get, the less I believe the purpose of life is simply to achieve.

Achievement matters. We should strive to accomplish worthwhile things.

But becoming matters more.

If Christopher Nolan’s film sends a new generation back to Homer, I hope some of them discover what I found all those years ago.

The Odyssey is not simply about a journey across the wine-dark sea.

It is about the lifelong journey of becoming.

And that journey need never end.

Keep exploring.

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

Keep becoming.