Leaving again?

Odysseus put the odyssey in odyssey.  He’d finally made it home: to his wife and son and father and dog.  But then he’s called to a second journey.

This second journey was not across water but to the mainland and a journey inland, or, we may say, inward.

Myths hold before us the great Human narrative of life and death, with all its inexplicable and paradoxical content.  Through these stories we make sense of who we are and the Human journey.  Appreciating their generalities rather than their specificities, we understand them to be as powerful as ever.

I’ve often seen myself as on a “slow journey in the same direction,” not a linear one but leading me somewhere.  Just recently I’ve come upon my own myth-like elements in this.  I recently wrote about an old gentleman visited in hospital who told me how he voted for me to go into training for the work at the same meeting he was retiring at.  Two days ago, he died – some thirty six years after he voted for me.  At the same time, I realise I have a second journey to make.  I am thankful for this man’s graceful life and how he shared these things with me in the last few days.

I don’t know what Odysseus must have felt like as he set out again.  Had he hoped for a Happy Ever After ending?  Do I?  Or do I relish the opportunity of doing what I love to do which takes me on again.*

‘Wisdom unleashed our capacity to create the good.  Wisdom not only sees the good that must be done now, but catalyses such events that result in a good future.’**

(*It might be some difficult thing which awakens us to the second journey.  Quoting Barack Obama’s 2008 election advisor Rahm Emanuel, Ryan Holiday brings encouragement in this direction: “You never want to let a serious crisis go to waste. … A crisis provides the opportunity for us to do the things that you could not do before” – The Obstacle is the Way.)
(**From Erwin McManus’s Uprising.)