The Grad School Diaries: The Odysseus Factor

So here I am, 43 years old, with jackscrews in my neck and almost no hair left on the top of my head, going back to school like it was the most natural thing in the world. I’m a doctoral student, at an age when most men have given up and started counting down the days until retirement, their minds never further from the mundane than their dreams of a larger bass boat, a shiny new sports car, or a better golf game, or perhaps all of the above. Never even realizing that they have given up; that the only appreciable change left in their lives between now and the grave is the day they leave their mind-numbing jobs for an even less engaging life as retirees with nothing to occupy their time at all. Which goes a long way toward explaining why I’ve become a grad student again, actually…

So I quit my safe, steady, well-paying job at UCLA Extension, left the South Bay (the place I love most in this world), convinced my wife to quit her job and sell our house and come with me to central Michigan, a place neither of us knew anything about, and helped to pack up our things and go. A few months later we found ourselves here, in East Lansing, home of Michigan State University (hereinafter MSU), and the Broad School of Business – easily the best of the three graduate programs that accepted me. It’s not really as dramatic as it sounds; it’s not like we can’t go home again (if LA is still home) in a few hours by airplane, or like East Lansing isn’t a beautiful place, with many new things to see and experience and learn about. It’s not even as if we weren’t both ready for a new challenge and a new stage of life. That’s not it…

I’ve spent most of my adult life avoiding this path, afraid that I didn’t have the patience to be a teacher, or the work ethic to survive several years of insanely difficult effort, or (it will out!) even the intellectual ability to operate at this level. It’s not easy to admit, even to myself, even to this blank white space; I’m generally considered to be afraid of nothing, and I’ve worked hard to live up to that reputation for most of my life. But I have been afraid of this, for many long years, and the white-hot adrenaline burn I keep feeling in my gut is a reminder that along with all of the other emotions of transition, and challenge, and alienation, and anxiety, I’m also worried sick. And I find myself reverting to a much older and simpler aspect of my being…

It was never supposed to be Odysseus who was the central figure of the Homeric epics. It’s only because the Odyssey and the Iliad are the only books of the cycle to have survived that we know him the best of all of the heroes of myth. I can’t even begin to speculate about how different our world and our Western culture would be with Ajax, or Achilles, or Agamemnon as the archetype of the warrior/adventurer, the hero we all want to be when things get difficult. Perhaps we would all want to be bold, fearless warriors, who laugh in the face of certain death, regard pain as a problem that befalls lesser creatures, and concern ourselves only with honor, courage and duty as we charge directly after what we want…

But none of those things came to pass. Instead, the foundational story for our entire culture, or at least all of the heroic and epic adventures it contains, became the story of the cleverest, slickest, trickiest man of his time – and perhaps of all times. Instead, all of us want (in some way, at some level) to be Odysseus; the great strategist, the trickster, the man who can outrun any threat, outthink any foe, outwit the gods themselves. The man who can always find a way; the hero that we know, deep in our hearts, can always bring us home, safely, if we would only let him…

It’s the reason why we love Indiana Jones so much. And James Bond, and Tom Sawyer, and Captains Kirk, Picard, Cisco, Janeway, and Archer, and Han Solo, and a thousand others just like them. It’s why the hero in our stories isn’t just the biggest, or the toughest, or even the smartest, but rather the fastest, the slickest, the trickiest man there is. He may be the best shot, or throw the best punch, or command god-like powers or fantastic technologies, but when the crisis comes, what we all want to see is our hero outwitting the antagonist, whoever or whatever it is, and winning without any of those great advantages at all; winning just because he has that gift. Because if he can, then maybe we can, too; maybe we can find that sudden flash of brilliant insight, that moment of clarity, that one great trick that will enable us to save the day and survive the crisis, even though we don’t have a killer left hook, a god-like power or a bottomless bag of high-tech gadgets. It’s the Odysseus factor, and all of us want it, on those days when we are overmatched, overextended, and over our heads…

And if I have to explain to you why this would have occurred to me on the week when I began what has to be the most insane, reckless, all-or-nothing, death-or-glory stunt of my entire life to date, then you really haven’t been paying attention. Just like everyone else, when the crisis comes, I want to be the slickest and smartest hero of them all: strategist, tactician, adventurer, fighter, and trickster. Because, at some level, all of us have to become Odysseus to those we will lead into the fire, even when when that's just ourselves; all of us must accept that role, and the primal attitude that comes with it - as I must now, if I am to make it through this passage. The odds do not favor my success, but I must not care; I must never back down, never give up - and failure is for other men. One day, perhaps, the odds will catch up with me, and on that day I will die…

But today is not that day. Today is Day 1, and I have work to do…