The Lotus Bloom

I walked out of Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey thinking it might be the best movie I have ever seen.

Days later, I still think that.

Certainly the production was extraordinary. The performances. The scale of it. The beauty and violence and enormity of what was happening on the screen.

It was also, from beginning to end, one of the most captivating movies I have ever watched.

But that isn’t why.

It was Nolan’s telling of the story.

His interpretation of Odysseus and the long journey home hit me in a very specific way.

I saw a man living with the consequences of his own actions.

Odysseus was the one who conceived of the Trojan Horse. The idea worked. Troy fell.

And then he had to live with what that victory actually meant.

The destruction.

The death.

The shame.

The guilt.

The regret.

The knowledge that something born inside his own mind had helped unleash all of it.

And then he tried to go home.

Instead, he lost control of nearly everything.

The sea.

His surroundings.

His direction.

The men he was responsible for.

One by one, the people who had followed him died.

Until eventually, there was only him.

There was something devastating to me about watching a man who had once been powerful enough to change the course of a war become almost completely powerless over what happened next.

And somewhere along that journey, he lost himself too.

He spent years with a nymph, eating the lotus flower and living in a blissful state where he didn’t have to remember.

Pleasure.

Comfort.

Oblivion.

A life where he didn’t have to fully face Troy, the men he had lost, or his own choices.

Except even there, something inside him knew.

There was a life somewhere that belonged to him.

A wife.

A son.

Home.

Eventually, he had to choose between the comfort of avoidance and the pain of remembering.

And remembering meant hurting.

It meant facing the shame and guilt and grief he had spent years escaping.

He chose the pain.

Not for the sake of suffering, but because walking through it was the only way back to reality.

The only way he could do the right thing.

The only way home.

Avoidance can feel better than truth.

Fantasy can be beautiful.

Numbness can feel like peace.

But Odysseus had to be willing to hurt if he wanted his life back.

So he left.

And even when he finally made it to Ithaca, returning home wasn’t as simple as walking through the door.

He had been warned not to expect a fanfare.

He had been gone too long. He didn’t know what had happened in his absence, who was loyal, how he would be received, or whether revealing himself would even be safe.

So he hid his identity.

He watched.

He waited.

And when the time came, he revealed himself and reclaimed his place in his family.

Nolan didn’t give me a story about a great hero overcoming a series of obstacles.

At least, that isn’t the story I saw.

I saw a story about what comes after.

After the consequential decision.

After the victory.

After the certainty.

After the damage has been done and there is no changing it.

And I think I know why that hit something so deep inside me.

I have loved someone who chose the other path.

Someone who avoided the emotional discomfort of being honest with me because avoiding it served him.

Someone who, when faced with the consequences of his own choices, chose his own version of the lotus bloom.

He rewrote his memory of me.

Of us.

Of what happened.

A version that allowed him to keep moving without ever having to sit across from me and have the painful, honest conversation that reality required.

I know what it is like to be on the other side of someone’s avoidance.

Maybe that is why watching Odysseus eventually choose to remember affected me so deeply.

Because remembering wasn’t comfortable.

The truth didn’t make him feel better.

It made him hurt.

And he walked toward it anyway.

He chose to know.

To grieve.

To carry what was his to carry.

To stop escaping into a reality that required him to forget.

And then he went home.

There is something profoundly human about our desire to protect ourselves from emotional pain.

And something profoundly courageous about deciding that we would rather hurt inside the truth than live comfortably inside a lie.

I don’t know whether the person I loved will ever make that choice.

And it isn’t mine to know anymore.

I am not the home waiting for him at the end of that journey.

His reckoning belongs to him.

His choices belong to him.

What belongs to me is my own life.

And maybe that is what I found so hopeful in Nolan’s telling of this ancient story.

What we have done matters.

What has happened to us matters.

What we have lost matters.

There are consequences we cannot undo and pain we cannot avoid forever.

But we are not powerless in what happens next.

We can choose to remember.

We can choose the truth.

We can choose to walk through the pain instead of around it.

We can choose to be people of character and courage.

We can choose.