If a quest for meaning requires adventure you have been on one since you choose caregiving. Your harder stories are easier to tell than live because caregiving is peppered with challenges to quit.

   You who stayed are my heroes. What keeps you going?

   In 8th grade Mrs. Emerson handed us one of the greatest quest stories in history. The tale of Odysseus (aka Ulysses) is The Odyssey of Homer. The hero's story is so riveting it survived a three-thousand-year journey from Homer's hands through millions more before it reached mine.

   Ulysses's quested to see "new worlds." His journey's monsters are so vivid their names are woven into storytelling's fabric.

  You may know Homer's Sirens, witches whose songs & beauty were so alluring that sailors would dive overboard & swim to their deaths.

   However, Ulysses protected his sailors by blocking their ears with wax. Desperate himself to hear the magic songs but unsure of his ability to resist them he had his crew lash him to the mast & ignore any pleas he made for release. 

   Temptations, of course, are as dangerous as any gun-toting thug. Homer knew that. One of his questers was the warrior Achilles who could not be killed because his mother had dipped him into the river Styx whose waters would protect him. But she had held her baby by the heel thus leaving that spot vulnerable.

   Think of that next time that tendon of yours hurts.

   How many Siren songs have entered your ears? How many discovered your Achilles heel & tried to take advantage?

   Tell me neither has happened & I will tell you your life has been a rest not a quest. 

    Tennyson's poem, Ulysses, ends with my mantra: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." 

-Erie Chapman

Painting, "Ulysses and the Sirens" John Waterhouse, 1891