After the Miracle: What Odysseus Taught Me

I sat in a theater watching Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and about halfway through, I stopped watching it as a movie. I started watching it as if it were my own life.

Homer’s story begins right after the Trojan War ends. Odysseus should be able to go straight home to Ithaca. Instead, the journey stretches into ten years, and almost none of those years look anything like victory. That gap between when the crisis ends and when the person actually gets home is the part of the story most people skip past. It’s the part I’ve lived in for the last seventeen years.

On January 15, 2009, I was the last passenger out of US Airways Flight 1549. The plane went down in the Hudson River. That event itself was over in minutes. But like Odysseus, the real journey started right after the wreck, not during it.

Look at what actually happens to him along the way. He lands on the island of the Cyclops, and Polyphemus traps his men in a cave, picking them off one by one, until Odysseus has to outsmart a threat he cannot outfight. I think about the years after the crash when I faced my own version of that. Not a monster in a cave, but fear and grief that could have trapped me the same way if I’d tried to muscle through it instead of getting smarter about how I dealt with it. Changing the meaning of what happened.

Then there’s Circe, who turns his men into swine, and Odysseus has to find a way to break a spell that’s already reshaped the people around him before he can even think about moving forward. Crisis does that to people. It changes them before they’ve agreed to it. Part of my work for the last two decades has been helping people recognize when fear or trauma has quietly turned them into a version of themselves they don’t want to be, and helping them find their way back. That is why I did my TEDx talk.

The Sirens are the part of the story most people remember, the song so beautiful it pulls sailors onto the rocks. Odysseus has tied himself to the mast so he can hear the song without letting it destroy him. That image has stayed with me more than almost any other part of the Odyssey. There’s real value in being able to face something dangerous and beautiful at the same time, the pull of fame, the pull of a story people want to keep hearing you tell, without letting it steer your ship onto the rocks. I’ve had to tie myself to my own mast more than once.

Then Scylla and Charybdis, a monster on one side and a whirlpool on the other, no clean path through, only a choice about which danger to accept. Anyone who has run a business or led a team through hard years knows that stretch of water. There is rarely a path with no cost. There’s only the choice of which cost you’re willing to pay.

Odysseus even travels into the underworld to speak with the dead, including his own mother, before he can find his way forward. I didn’t literally do that, but anyone who has sat with grief long enough to let it teach them something, rather than just endure it, knows exactly what that scene is describing. I speak about hearing my Mother’s voice at the time when I was executing my escape, and it changed the direction of that time and my life.

And then there’s Calypso, who holds him on her island for seven years, comfortable, safe, and going absolutely nowhere. That might be the most honest part of the whole story. Sometimes the thing that keeps you from getting home isn’t a monster at all. It’s comfort. It’s staying somewhere safe long after you were supposed to move.

Meanwhile, back in Ithaca, Penelope is fighting her own version of the journey. Suitors have filled the house; certain Odysseus is never coming back; certain she should give up and choose someone else. She weaves a burial shroud by day and unravels it by night, buying time, refusing to let go of what she still believes is coming. That’s not a passive act. That’s its own kind of endurance, and I think about the people who wait for someone to come home from their own crisis, who carry their own version of that story, far too often without anyone telling them how brave that waiting actually is.

When Odysseus finally does reach Ithaca, he doesn’t walk through the front door as a conquering hero. Odysseus arrives disguised. He must prove his identity. This act requires him to reclaim his home by stringing a bow no one else could draw. Getting home was never the finish line. Becoming someone capable of reclaiming that life was.

That’s the whole story, isn’t it? Not the shipwreck. Not the war. Those years in between test a person. They change him, humble him, and rebuild him before he is ready for the home across the water.

I survived a river. Then I spent years discovering who I needed to become because of it. I also figured out what I owed the people waiting for me to come home. That’s the story I keep telling on stages. Not the ten minutes over the Hudson, but everything that came after, because that’s where the real journey always is.