The Odyssey, Homecoming, and Belonging in a Wide World

I was seventeen, about to turn eighteen, when I landed in California to start college. I had a suitcase, a dorm assignment, and a class schedule with a required course on it called Literature 10.

The first book assigned was The Odyssey.

I had loved Greek mythology since I was a child, so on paper this was a gift. What I had not expected was to read it in that particular week, in a country I had been in for four days, at an age where I still had to do the arithmetic to work out what time it was at home. A man spends ten years trying to get somewhere. That was the plot. I read it in a dorm room, ten time zones from everyone I knew, and it did not feel like a book about the Bronze Age.

The Greek word for the homecoming is nostos. Our word nostalgia comes from it, joined to algos, which means pain. The pain of the return. Ancient Greek had a single word for the ache of trying to get back to a place, and it turns out to be the same word we now use for a mild fondness for songs from our twenties. The original was much heavier.

That course kept going. Dante's Inferno, Goethe's Faust, and later, at the far end of the syllabus, Joyce's Ulysses. I did not know it then, but I had been handed a set of keys that would keep opening doors for the next twenty years, and I now live in the city where Joyce set his version of the same story, which is a coincidence I have stopped finding coincidental.

The words Homer uses

Homer describes Odysseus in the first line of the poem as polytropos. Translators have rendered it as the man of twists and turns, the man of many ways, the man who was never at a loss. Literally it is "of many turnings." It can mean well-traveled and it can mean adaptable, and the ambiguity is the point. The turnings of the road and the turnings of the mind are the same word.

At seventeen I read that as adventure. It also describes a competence: the ability to become slightly different depending on where you have landed, without losing track of who you are underneath. I have since lived in six countries and I would now call that the central skill of my adult life. It was not something I arrived with. It got built in the twists and turns themselves, across one long journey that is still going and a great many smaller ones inside it.

The second word is metis. Cunning intelligence, practical wisdom, the ability to solve a problem sideways. Odysseus is the hero who never wins by being the strongest, because he is not the strongest. He wins by thinking. He gets out of the Cyclops's cave by telling the monster his name is Nobody, so that when the other Cyclopes hear screaming and ask who is hurting him, the answer sends them away.

That trick is also the loneliest moment in the poem. I read the book twenty-five years ago and I still remember it clearly, because to survive, he has to give up his name.

Anyone who has moved countries knows the feeling of that trade. You learn how to be legible in the new place. You soften what marks you as foreign. You get good at the local references, the local humor, the local way of speaking. And it works.

It works so well that, every now and then, you catch yourself wondering what got left behind in the process.

It is a bit like having a Starbucks name, except instead of using it for five minutes while you wait for a coffee, you use it for years. You introduce a version of yourself that is easier for other people to pronounce, understand, and place. Eventually that version becomes so familiar that you almost forget it is an adaptation.

The third strand is xenia, the guest-host relationship. Half the poem turns on whether a stranger is fed before he is questioned. The Greeks treated hospitality toward someone with no claim on you as a sacred obligation, enforced by Zeus himself, and the poem's monsters are monstrous mainly because they break it. I have thought about that a great deal in the years since, mostly when someone has done something generous for me that I could not repay, which is the way almost everything useful in my working life has actually happened.

The open questions

What didn't strike me when I first read the book in college was that Odysseus gets home in Book 23, but there are 24 books. At seventeen, I assumed the whole point of the story was the homecoming. He gets back to Ithaca. The journey is over. The end. Except it isn't the end.

He continues the journey past the homecoming in Book 24. And before that, in Book 11, when Odysseus goes down to consult the dead, the prophet Tiresias tells him what happens after the homecoming. He must take an oar and walk inland, away from the sea, until he reaches people so far from the water that they mistake the oar on his shoulder for a winnowing fan. Then he plants it in the ground and makes his sacrifice. Only then is he done.

Homer's hero, at the moment of his arrival, is given instructions for another journey.

Dante takes this further and much darker. In Canto 26 of the Inferno, Ulysses is in the eighth circle, wrapped in a flame, and tells the story of what he did after Ithaca. He got restless. He gathered his old crew, sailed past the Pillars of Hercules, out beyond the edge of the known world, and drowned. Dante's Ulysses cannot stop moving, and the not stopping is what kills him.

Tennyson, seven centuries later, wrote the same man as an aging king who finds his own kingdom unbearably small, and made him sound heroic doing it. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught those closing lines as inspiration. Read again, they are also the words of a man who cannot sit still in a house he spent twenty years trying to reach.

Three writers, separated by centuries, arrive at the same insight: getting there is not the end of the story. In some ways, it is where the real story begins.

Do we see a pattern here? 

The older I get, the more I notice how often this theme appears.

Dante's Divine Comedy is a journey, from the first line of the Inferno to the last of the Paradiso.

Virgil's Aeneid is a journey.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha is a journey.

Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist is a journey.

Even modern business careers often follow the same narrative structure.

You leave something familiar. You encounter uncertainty. You lose confidence. You find mentors. You make mistakes. You become someone different. Then one day you look around and realize the destination mattered less than who you became along the way.

The reason these stories endure is that they describe a pattern we recognize in our own lives.

Adventure and Belonging. Home and Identity

One of the themes in The Odyssey that strikes me more now than it did when I was young is the tension between adventure and belonging.

Odysseus is offered opportunities to stay elsewhere. Comfort. Power. Immortality, even. Yet he keeps choosing the harder path:

Home.

Not because home is perfect, but because it is his.

At seventeen, I mostly identified with the adventure. Today I understand the longing for home much more deeply. After living in multiple countries, building a career abroad, marrying across cultures, raising children, and creating a life far from where I started, I understand why belonging occupies such a central place in the story. Most of us spend part of our lives exploring and another part trying to understand where, and with whom, we belong.

Another theme that feels increasingly relevant is identity. Throughout the epic, Odysseus constantly shifts roles. Warrior. Sailor. Leader. Beggar. Husband. Father. King.

The challenge is not simply surviving the journey. It is integrating all of those versions of himself into a coherent whole.

I see this with coaching clients all the time. Executives becoming founders. Managers becoming leaders. Parents navigating empty nests. Professionals leaving corporate careers.

People are often less afraid of change itself than they are of the identity shift that accompanies it.

• Who am I when the title changes?

• Who am I when the role disappears?

• Who am I when the old version no longer fits?

Those are Odyssey questions too.

Yesterday

Yesterday I watched Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey in IMAX.

The experience was spectacular. The scale, the visuals, the sense of epic adventure. It reminded me why these stories have survived for nearly three thousand years.

It also reminded me that I have been carrying this story around with me for almost thirty years. From that Literature 10 classroom in America. Through graduate school. Through my corporate years. Through entrepreneurship. Through marriage, parenthood, moving countries, and all the other chapters life brings.

Every few years, The Odyssey seems to reappear in a different form and ask the same question.

Who have you become because of the journey?

That is a question worth revisiting, whether you are seventeen and arriving in a new country for the first time or much further down the road wondering what comes next.

---

Hi! I'm Merve. 👋 I help corporate leaders and business owners build high-performing teams, grow their businesses, and advance their careers. Through executive coaching, leadership development programs, workshops, and advisory work, I support leaders navigating growth, transition, and change. If this theme resonates, get in touch to discuss how I can support you.