Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was an incredible film. I saw it in theaters earlier this summer on the big IMAX downtown. It was a spectacular experience—still sticking with me weeks after seeing it. This adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey has some real powerful insights in our modern age of comfort and distraction. In the story, Odysseus and his men are returning from years of war at Troy after a long and tumultuous campaign. Odysseus longs to return home to Ithaca, his wife Penelope, and his son Telemachus. He and his crew face a series of obstacles on their return voyage—monsters, storms, witches, and whirlpools—but one was more dangerous than any other. He survives the Cyclops, who begins eating them. Circe turns his men into pigs. He journeys into the underworld, sails past the deadly song of the Sirens, and navigates between the six-headed Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis. Eventually, Zeus destroys his ship, killing everyone aboard except Odysseus. And after all that, he washes ashore to a beautiful island called Ogygia. There, he meets a goddess named Calypso. She takes care of him, feeds him, shelters him. He is offered immortality and freedom from aging. He could stop fighting. Stop traveling. Stop suffering. He spends seven years there. He forgets about Ithaca. About Penelope. Telemachus. He was so comfortable, he forgot about his family. He forgot about his destination. He stayed where he was and time slipped by, even though all he wanted to do was go home. Ultimately, the gods intervene and compel Calypso to release him. Then, he gets back to Ithaca and kills many suitors trying to marry his wife. Of all the dangers Odysseus encountered on his journey home, Calypso was actually the most insidious. The monsters wanted to kill him. The seas tried to swallow him. His men wanted to throw him overboard. Calypso offered him paradise. On Ogygia, Odysseus had everything he needed. He was safe. He was wanted. He was so comfortable, he forgot his purpose, he forgot who he was. Calypso was the greatest threat because she doesn’t seem all that dangerous. Her deceptive nature stranded our hero, delaying the journey home even longer than it already had been. He was lulled into a sense of security, so cozy and coddled, he stopped moving. There is a real danger in staying too long. Comfort is not wrong on its face. We need to rest. We need to recharge. We need stability. We need seasons of our life where we slow down. When things are quiet and nothing pressing needs to be done. The problem stirs when comfort begins to slow you down until you stop moving indefinitely. That inertia is as insidious as Calypso’s island. Though you might have everything you need, you could be so comfortable you stop growing. You prefer to stay where you are because it’s easier and less stressful. But if you don’t push yourself, if you don’t strive or go outside of your comfort zone, you’ll never fully comprehend the extent of your abilities. The job you have is fine, so you stay another year because it’s easy even though you stopped growing several years ago. A relationship has stopped growing, but confronting what needs to change feels harder than maintaining the status quo. The city you live in is what you know, so you don’t venture out somewhere new to see what else is out there. Fleeing familiarity feels frightening. Uncertainty is paralyzing. But stagnation is just as alarming. Lack of direction is far more dangerous. Stillness is crucial in mindset, but treacherous in relation to action. Staying still when you want to do more, feel more, be more, can create a fissure in your life that can tear you apart. Though nothing feels wrong on its face, when you peel back the layers, you know that doing the hard thing is what you have to do. It’s easy to stay. It’s hard to take that leap into something unknown. At 27, I had to get comfortable being uncomfortable. I left alcohol behind and reconnected with myself and others in rehab for 40 days. Learning how to not escape pain, but to feel it, process it, and learn to live with it was incredibly hard, but ultimately very rewarding. I had to learn how to not default to comfort, because in many ways, it was holding me back. In my descent toward rock bottom, I forgot who I was becoming. I forgot what I wanted. I was drinking and smoking and craving comfort over everything else. I didn’t realize I was no longer living the life I wanted. I failed to remember that I wanted a wife, a family, a home, a career. I had to get off the island and set out to sea to find my way back to the best version of myself. It wasn’t easy but it was what I had to do. I found out what I was capable of by getting comfortable being uncomfortable. And I couldn’t be happier. Comfort can be a healthy place when you are in recovery. I was doing uncomfortable work but I was taken care of in the confines of a facility designed to rehabilitate people like me. The modern comforts we enjoy should certainly be cherished. However, comfort can become dangerous when it becomes your destination. When all you crave is to be unchallenged, it is easy to then become unmotivated, stagnant, and directionless. Without discomfort, we atrophy, and we lose our sense of self. Like Calypso’s island, comfort can cage us because it can keep us trapped forever. If we never wake up and realize where we are going, we will hold ourselves back before we realize how much of our life has passed us by. Riddled with regret, we lament our lack of drive and initiative. If we don’t get out of our own way and deliberately choose discomfort regularly, we will find that regret eating away at us for years until we reach a certain age and feel hollowed out by what could have been. Nearly eight years ago to the day, I met my wife. I was only about seven months out of rehab. Unsure of who I was or what I was doing, I wasn’t sure if I should be dating yet. Instead of reflexively saying no and staying in my isolated bubble, I said yes to our first date. Now, I am a husband, father, and homeowner. I have everything I have ever wanted, all because I said yes to something uncomfortable. Professionally, I had to make a big pivot recently. For at least a year, I knew I needed a change. In my previous position, I had the expertise, reputation, and security. Nothing was necessarily forcing my decision. There was just this nagging sense of stagnation. This feeling deep down that told me I had to move on. It was really hard to leave. But that feeling of stagnation only grew and grew with each passing month. So I left my job of nearly eight years, a career track more than a decade in the making, and went into something new that built on the skills I’d developed while entering into a new industry full of uncertainty and opportunity. It’s been a life-changing experience for me. It was so hard to leave, but it was time to move on. It would have been easier for me to stay there. Stay the course. Go through the motions. But I wanted more out of my career. I wanted growth. Opportunity. Challenge. Just because you’re staring down one path does not mean you have to stay on it forever. We all have our own versions of Calypso in our life. A job that is comfortable but no longer challenging us. A relationship that feels safe but deep down does not feel right. An identity we think we need to have because of what others might think of us. A dream we keep postponing because the timing is not right yet. Habits that are not destroying us but are quietly keeping us from becoming who we know we could be. Odysseus left paradise not because hardship was preferable. He left because paradise was not home. We don’t have to make life hard on purpose. We don’t have to choose discomfort for its own sake. We should enjoy stability. We should crave comfort when it suits us. There’s no need to randomly manufacture discomfort just because. It’s knowing where you’re trying to go—then recognizing when something comfortable is keeping you from going there. The alternative to the island is the sea. Leaving comfort requires facing our mortality, navigating uncertainty, dealing with danger, and experiencing more suffering. But it’s also Ithaca. It’s home. It’s our family. Our identity. Our values. Our purpose. We all must choose to do the hard thing to find our way home. We all need something guiding the way. But if we fall into the trap of comfort, we could forget entirely where we are going or who we are doing it all for. The real question is if the comfort we feel is because we are resting or because we are slowly forgetting we were going somewhere else. Get full access to Rewired at rpshanahan.substack.com/subscribe
