The Existential Question Only You Can Answer

I grabbed my blanket, bought my ticket online and went to see The Odyssey in the theater last week. This week on Zen Pop, Todd and I talk through our whole experience with this film, but I wanted to focus on writing about one of the most touching and devastating parts, the scene where Odysseus decides to tie himself to the mast and listen to the Sirens’ song.

I have heard or read this story many times before, and the Sirens’ song is usually framed as don’t give in to desire, but in the movie it’s framed as, what you’re most afraid of isn’t desire, it’s grief. In Nolan’s version, what Odysseus hears while tied to the mast is personal, pointed, and existential:

…all the things you wanted to be, then all the things you wish you had never wished for. It was the delicious itch you go to scratch but find it’s under the skin, so you can’t reach it. The delicious itch becomes unbearable, and it told you that what you most want is what you most can’t have. And what you most can’t have is what you already had and lost.

This was the part of the movie I thought about for the next two days, and it brought to mind two other stories that have made a strong impression on me. First, the Hasidic parable about Rabbi Zusya, which I actually have taped to my wall at home:

“Rabbi Zusya!” one of the students cried. “What happened?”

​“I am dying,” answered Zusya. “And I am very frightened.”

“Why are you afraid?” another student asked. “You, who have been like Moses in your own time? What do you have to fear?”

The rabbi answered, “When I come before God, God will not ask me why I wasn’t more like Moses. God will ask me why I wasn’t more like Zusya.”

And then Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a story I became obsessed with after reading it in a summer community college classroom in 1991. Ivan Ilyich is on his deathbed when he asks himself, what if my whole life was wrong? Not sinful or scandalous, just wrong in the sense that he spent it performing correctness instead of living true. While dying he realizes he never chose his life, he only followed a script for what a life should look like and then did his best to perform it. It’s only at the very end that he understands how the script cost him the chance to be himself.

Just like Odysseus never wanted the war, it was Menelaus and Agamemnon’s fight over Helen, but he got pulled in anyway, swept up in the ideal of the Greek warrior instead of the already meaningful life waiting for him at home. The Sirens tell him he doesn't really want to go home, but he does. He's just too entangled in grief and despair over who he's become and what he's done, and too caught up in being the mastermind behind the Trojan horse and the man whose name will be known for generations.

The Sirens show him everything he wanted and everything he already had and lost: twenty years spent in someone else's war, chasing someone else's idea of a great man, when he could have been a king, husband, and father at home. He realizes how much of his life went toward destruction and toward building someone else's legacy, and how much that cost him.

If we're being good English majors (or in my case, minors), we could annotate the Sirens' song and pull out so many different lessons from it. But the lesson I hear loudest is the same one running through the Rabbi Zusya and Ivan Ilyich stories, that living the life that's inherently yours matters, and failing to do that is the grief that haunts you.

Broken down line by line, all the things you want to be is about borrowed ambition, about what society has told you is right and best and what culture has told you to strive for. That’s the same borrowed ambition Zusya was afraid of when he worried about living a life like Moses instead of living a life like himself, it’s the same borrowed ambition written into Ivan Illyich’s life script.

Then comes the realization that all the things you wished you never wished for were about society’s goals that ended up being hollow. They belonged to somebody else and were never yours, and chasing them never gave you what you actually needed, even once you got them. It’s like eating empty calories. Your body takes them in, but it doesn’t know what to do with them because what your body actually needs is nutrition, and real nutrition only comes from things that are in alignment with who you are.

How many wealthy or famous people end up miserable and still needing more because what they chased and thought would fill them up simply didn't work? They took in empty calories and now they feel even hungrier than before because they got everything they were told to want (money, fame, houses), and have nothing left to chase to make the emptiness go away.

And the reason the delicious itch can never be scratched is because ambition and striving, no matter how well you do it by society's standards, won't make you Moses, and following a perfect life script won't make you Ivan Ilyich. Becoming yourself was never about a script, it's about staying true to what you feel and what you know. And what I want but can never have is like me wishing I could sound like Lady Gaga or write like Anne Lamott. I can’t, because that’s them and I’m me. Wanting to be anybody else is chasing a borrowed life, one that was never yours to begin with.

And what you already had and lost, is the real you that you could have been embodying this whole time instead of longing to perfect your performance as someone else. It’s the self you never let yourself be.

This is paradoxically obvious and so hard to do, because being your true self in a culture that tells you who to be and keeps you on a predictable path, whether that's an educational system, a workplace, or a family, is hard to deviate from. We only know what we know, and we all want to be good kids and do what we're told. But when we realize we've been trying to inhabit someone else's body, personality, lifestyle, or career, we see that we’ve missed being ourselves and the peace that comes with it.

I recently listened to a podcast interview I did years ago about one of my books and I was asked what I’d most want people to say or remember about me. I answered something about kindness or about being kind, and while listening I realized that answer was something my mom would say, or something I felt was the right thing to say. And while I of course hope I am practicing kindness, what I actually want to be remembered for is being myself.

Not in some outlandish, false, or performative way, I mean just being me. Liking what I like, sharing what I know, enjoying what I enjoy, speaking up about what’s important. I don’t want to be a mystery to people, I’d rather be known and dependable so people know where I stand instead of wondering. If I'm there, it's because I want to be, and if I'm saying something, it's because it's true in the moment. I'm somewhat predictable, not boring hopefully, but dependable. To me, that's the ultimate goal, to live as ourselves while we're here, which is why Rabbi Zusya and Ivan Ilyich have stuck with me, and why the Sirens' song in the movie moved me so much.

I remember when my daughter came home with a prom dress a few years ago. She’d tried on a bunch of dresses, and when she got home she came into my room to show me the one she bought and it was lovely. But the next day she said, “I made a mistake. I bought a dress that’s about who I used to be, or who I was trying to be. I didn’t get the one I actually wanted.” So we found a way to go back and get the one she really wanted, because this awareness wasn’t driven by outside opinion or feedback yet, it was about a feeling she had that this dress was out of alignment with her current self, an instinct that she wasn’t being true and wanted to correct it. And I wanted to support her because the option to self correct isn’t always available.

And as a therapist, I can tell you that it’s little choices like this over time that fill the hole you are trying to fill. It’s the ability to stay close to who you are and self correct when you can. It’s about knowing what a YES! and NO! feels like in your body. It’s about knowing and maintaining your own boundaries and appreciating yourself in this place and time.

And the grief of not doing this, of spending a lifetime swept up in other people's patterns and directives, is what Odysseus is devastated by and what Zusya and Ivan were worried about on their deathbeds. These stories and parables represent the importance of the humanities, a chance to see ourselves through other people's lives and learn from them. To exchange the prom dress, to recognize our choices, to wake up and live our lives as ourselves rather than for the approval or expectations of everyone else.

p.s. Paid subscribers will receive this week’s Zen Moment podcast in their inbox. If you’re considering upgrading, below is a preview from this week’s show.

This week on Zen Pop, we talked through The Odyssey to better understand it and figure out what mattered most. 🎧🎙️