Blog Title Explanation

The term ‘odyssey’ comes from one of my favorite writers, Homer, who wrote The Odyssey, describing Odysseus’s ten-year journey returning home from the Trojan War. I envision an odyssey as not only a long journey filled with hardships and adventurous accounts, but also as a journey of learning and growth. I hope that it will not take me ten years to be able to one day go to India, but I think that the journey surrounding the experience of living in India (or any other country for that matter) will last longer than ten years. This is especially true when thinking about the long time preparations, the actual time of living there, and the effects that going through these preparations and experiences will have on the rest of my life. Life is full of many personal journeys, after all, some going on simultaneously. I’m sure that spending time in India will change me, just as my field study in Italy changed me. But what would life be if it didn’t cause us to change and to learn? (…. Okay, I guess I should rightfully credit Carson from Downton Abbey for that quote….). Hence, the title of my blog. And yes, I recognize the irony that the “odyssey” is a word originating from the Western world, and India is not considered the Western world…but the origin of my journey is the western world, so it fits, right?