I spent years teaching and lecturing on the Odyssey.  Now that I’ve gotten involved in what is called narrative identity work, simply put, how you show up in the stories you tell about yourself, I wondered whether there is any connection between Homer’s Odyssey and StoryPathing™, the tool developed by Dr. Dennis Rebelo and presented in his book Story Like You Mean It.

Remarkably, Homer introduces the nominal hero of his poem in a state of abject defeat.  Odysseus, absent but much talked about by family, associates, and friends in the opening four chapters of the poem, makes his first personal appearance at the opening of chapter 5.  Although a castaway on a remote island far from the known world and captive to a powerful goddess, his situation is about to change.  And while Zeus (along with Athena) sets this change in motion, it is from here on a human level that Odysseus begins to trace his path home.

And this is the point:  Odysseus is really at the pivot between the past and a future when we the audience meets him, and he is poised to reclaim his identity by giving various iterations of his story to different audiences, including at the end to his wife Penelope.

The crucial role of storytelling is where I see a fruitful connection between StoryPathing™ and Homer’s Odyssey.  Odysseus uses his personal narrative as a tool both to gain awareness of his own identity and to reveal that identity to others.  StoryPathing™ operates on the same principle:  a apparatus for self-reflection that creates a personal narrative, allowing you to know and illustrate who you really are.  You may not think that your own story equates with an ‘epic’ life like Odysseus’.  But by engaging in StoryPathing™, you will find ‘clues in connections’ among ‘ordinary’ experiences that lead to extraordinary insight.