We spend so much of our lives trying to fulfill our distant ambitions, wanting to create the circumstances in which we’ll finally be happy. We’ll have worked everything out, organized our way of life, and finally reached a place of contentment. It is an enchanting idea, but ironically it means that most of the time we are restless because we’re not there yet. The present is just the tedious, dreary period we have to get through until in the future we can finally relax and enjoy ourselves.
The unexpected companion that we perhaps need to ease our frustration is a respectable Greek-speaking middle-ranking civil servant, Constantine Kavafi, who was born in Alexandria in 1863. Kavafi often felt displaced; he lived almost all his life in Egypt but thought of himself as a citizen of Byzantium, once the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. Kavafi only hit his creative stride in his 40s, and published little during his lifetime, held back by an anxiety that the overtly homoerotic themes he often wanted to explore would be met only with condemnation.
His poem that has most to help us is usually contained in a book of his collected poems and is titled “Ithaca”. Technically, the island of Ithaca was the home of the legendary Greek hero Ulysses, to which he spent 10 adventurous years trying to return after the fall of Troy. But in this poem, it signals whatever we imagine our destination in life to be; it’s the image we have in our heads of the distant time when we’ll finally be able to live properly, maybe once we found a partner, or bought a house, or secured a divorce, or made a fortune, or retired.
Kavafi doesn’t want to help us get to Ithaca more quickly; instead, he wants to delay a rival as long as possible. As you set out for Ithaca, he writes, “Hope your road is a long one”. Then Kavafi invokes what he calls “Harbors”. “May there be many summer mornings when, with what pleasure, what joy, you enter Harbors you’re seeing for the first time.” These emphatically are not our destination; they are the places and things, people and experiences we encounter precisely because we’re not home yet, and which won’t any longer be available to us when we finally get there.
Kavafi’s ideal is that when we arrive at our home, we may find that it is in many ways poor; that it has very little to offer us. He writes, “Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey; without her you wouldn’t have set out. She has nothing left to give you now, and if you find her poor, Ithaca won’t have fooled you, wise as you will have become.”
If we live this way, with a warm sense of appreciation, with a sense of adventure, with a willingness to explore byways, our destination when we get there won’t be the big fulfillment we once expected it to be. We’ll have found our fulfillment along the way. It won’t be what we find at the end that pleases us so much as what we bring with us. It won’t be marriage, making money, or retiring that in itself is so great. What will matter is what we have discovered in ourselves before we have reached these destinations.