Odyssey, life destinations, roads and serendipity
“You can never bathe in the same river twice” as ancient Heraclitus once declared, millennia ago. The road is the destination too. Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.
When the Greek Odysseus embarked home all omens seemed good. The Trojan war was finally over, his army having finally crushed the Trojan capital. He was longing for home, to return to his bucolic happiness, toiling his plot of land with his wife. But his return will be even more challenging than his war-waging. The first will be the last and the last will be first.
And this line from the Bible is one echoed in a variety of myths and religions. Yin and Yang. Some good in the bad, some bad in the good. Our ability to live with paradox and ambiguity is an eternal challenge, forever blurring decisions and true knowledge of self, as we try to guide themselves to a successful and happy life.
In the Iliad, the final victory is gruesome stuff, reminiscent of the most violent Aztec or monotheist Gods. Greek troops fly out of the wooden horse murdering all in sight. The rest of the Greek army flooding through the gates is galvanised and razes the city so “no stone stands atop another”. The Greeks destroy all buildings, kill all males, the entire royal family, rape and/or enslave every woman of the city. They cover the city ruins (and surrounding fields) with salt to make sure nothing every grows back. Greek soldiers rape women, some on the local altars to the Gods…
A few Trojans manage to take to the hills during the pandemonium. The Aenid house assembles a flotilla of fortune and sails in search of a new home around the Mediterranean, locally at first, then to Carthage, then to Rome where they will be linked with the early rise of the future superpower: Rome.
The Trojans who survived the sack of the city soon saw their fortunes improve, an ironic twist we all deep down can relate to. The victors, the Greek army of Hercules and Odysseus on the other hand, struggled to come home. Hercules never even made the end of the siege. Odysseus, cunning and brilliant that he was, is himself thrown on a journey of seemingly never-ending length before he can “come home”.
What the ancient Greeks were trying to tell us, is that life itself is not made of deceptively convenient “touch points” such as winning or losing a war. It is made of every moment we live. Of paradoxes. Sometimes the right action still yields the wrong result. Sometimes we overestimate the difficulty of a task (say, conquering Troy) and underestimate another (actually returning from Troy). A common source of stress and anxiety is an inability to live in the moment. To be too goal focused “eyes on the prize” to keep emotional awareness. The road is also, very much, the destination.
Odyssey on the road
Odysseus will take ten years to come home, an interesting symmetry to the ten years the Trojan war lasted. Yin and yang. First and last. It will take his entire guile and resourcefulness to plot his journey home. False idols, diving monsters, colossal storms, nothing will be spared to him. In many ways challenging him more profoundly than the war had. And the Odyssey in Greek mythology brings a very bitter-sweet challenge, all in patience and paradox, to bookend what started in a flash of violence, with the all-conquering Iliad.
Because in the end, life is full of unintended consequences. Like the Greek Gods turning furious over the ferocity of the Greek razing of Troy, and the destruction of most of their temples. A big tempest falls on the returning fleet, scattered like flotsam overnight, each Greek champion isolated in only a few boats, with a few men. The environment is now the enemy. Fate is now against the Greeks.
Agamemnon, a true Greek champion, is murdered soon after returning by his adulterous wife, who never forgave him sacrificing their daughter to appease the Oracle. Ajax the lesser who defiled a temple during the sack is killed immediately by a ferocious sea. Diomedes survives skirmishes and detours, only to find his wife committing adultery, he disappears.
In the end all is good for Odysseus. His faithful wife waited for him without despair and acting on principle to protect her family. Odysseus and Penelope reunite, having spent twenty years of their lives spent waging a war neither of them wanted or could control. And such are the Greek myth: Hardcore, yin and yang, escaping immediate judgment but suggesting many lessons and principles.
All the same, for all the imponderables, what we cannot control, the forces of fate, philosophy and psychology also offer the triumph of principle. Mythology here predates a huge source of mental health for early Romans, still currently practiced: Stoicism. A central tenet in Stoicism is to be able to separate what we can or cannot influence, learn to ignore what we cannot, and call us to bravely engage with what we can, with decency and moderation.
And here also the link between mythology and early philosophy/psychotherapy is obvious: despite its occasional randomness, human life follows trends and principles. Achilles lives an impulsive, passionate and violent life, he lives and dies by the sword. Odysseus is cunning, empathic and moderated, he struggles, lives and thrives. The Greeks win the battle but seemingly lose the war. There is nothing worth occupying. Their ferocious rape of the city unleashes their demise. It is not just about winning or losing, it is about how and why tells us the Odyssey.
Aeschylus, early Greek philosopher and playwright
The Odyssey is full of profound lessons, some obvious, some much more profound. We cannot list them all, for now we’ll also include this one: Learning, and change, are painful. The Greeks had the best plans but the worst intent, and the Gods chastise them for it, teaching them a bitter reprimand by cursing most of them. The few surviving ones are humbled by the return, through a series of painful, perilous adventures, and disappointment for what they find “home”. You never bathe into the same river twice.
The enriching journey home, the severe personal cost necessary to true wisdom, Aeschylus the great playwright of early Greece, put in a famous quote, still used today:
“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls, drop by drop, upon the heart and into our own despair, finally comes wisdom to us, by the awful grace of God.”
Aeschylus, “The Oresteia”
Here again, the words of ancient wisdom ring true today. Change is hard, it is one of the most challenging functions in organisational psychology. We all struggle with the unfamiliar. Not that many of us actually know an obvious way forward. Therapy is challenging and requires true desire for change, in our context it is entirely true too. But at the end, eternally too, there is wisdom. Learning, growing, acting with fairness and moderation tend to win in the long run. Odysseus lives, Hercules dies.
Serendipity & Synchronicity
But what emotional life to immerse into then? Myths like the Iliad and Odyssey are great to illustrate profound paradoxes and help us consider better decisions, but how do we live in the moment? How do we become more grounded, right now, while we are on the road already anyway? Stoicism is a great support as a moral compass, but we should not avoid emotions either. Learning a higher sense of emotional awareness and mindfulness, intangible as it may seem, enjoys a growing body of research proving its effectiveness.
Individuals with a higher emotional “grounding” in the moment tend to enjoy better life outcomes, and often describe episodes of synchronicity or serendipity, where others do not. The magic of chance encounters might not be entirely magical. As Napoleon once put it in a question, about a lieutenant up for promotion: “I can see he is good, but is he lucky?” in all seriousness. To Napoleon an intangible like “being lucky” just was not just that, and in that intuition he was probably right.
How do we tap into that? For the performance minded among us: How do we get in the zone? How do we get lucky? Clearly it is not all randomness, and it seems sometimes “stars align” and lights turn green all at once, what happens then? Emotional strength and awareness are massive predictors of real life success. And Stoicism can be a bit sparse when it comes to emotions, usually referring to them as in need of “being managed” but little is said about their tapestry, richness or quality.
Serendipity for us talks to the essential pendant to rationalism: empathy, intuition, and grounding. We bring that mindset to our therapy, we do not want you to just make the right decisions, we also want you to thrive emotionally. It is hugely healing and strengthening. For life is challenging, a concept found in all major religions. Often made of contradiction, misleading appearances and changing fortunes. O Fortuna: a never-ending series of ups and downs, that ancient sages said was not always possible to inflect, but always better handled with principle, whatever came.
Life does what life is: Surprise us, challenge us, and challenge not just our ability to meet immediate needs but also to live well, coherently, and following what principle? The Odyssey provides no easy answers to this either, it confuses, it wrong-foots, and it challenges. This mythological illustration of the travails and paradoxes of real life was of great importance to early philosophy and psychology.
To this day, modern psychotherapy still borrows a lot from mythology, philosophy and generally speaking the oral tradition that the Iliad and Odyssey where passed on through. Talk therapy (TCA, Gestalt or Psychodynamic for example) is really still, very much a current and effective therapeutic approach.
There is much to be gleaned from ancient advice: By being timeless and not subject to fashion, it shows starkly what wisdom is made of at heart. What is the best recipe to turn lemons into lemonade. How to weigh up complex decisions? What is that ideal beat to dance under the rain to?
Life is sometimes like that. Sometimes life does hit you in the head with a brick, and there should be no unwarranted obsession about order and fairness. Resilience, awareness and knowledge are a lot more helpful.
