Still on the way to Ithaca

Why your twenties are less about arriving and more about learning how to travel.

“When you set sail for Ithaca, wish for the road to be long, full of adventures, full of knowledge. Have Ithaca always in your mind. Your arrival there is what you are destined for. But don't in the least hurry the journey.”

— Constantine P. Cavafy

Cavafy is referring to Ulysses, or Odysseus, and his long journey back to Ithaca after the Trojan War. What should have been a simple return home turned into years of wandering: storms, shipwrecks, temptations, dangers, losses, detours. He encountered monsters and gods, islands that distracted him, places that tested him, and moments when the destination itself must have felt impossibly far away. And yet Ithaca remained there, like an invisible thread pulling him forward. Not just a physical place, but a point of meaning. A reason to continue.

And it got me thinking: in our twenties, aren’t we all a little like Ulysses?

Aren’t we all moving toward some version of Ithaca: some place, person, feeling, or future that we hope will finally feel like home?

Your twenties are often described as the age of freedom, possibility, experimentation. And they are. But they are also, more quietly, an age of disorientation. An age of becoming. Of almosts. Of trying on different cities, different friendships, different ambitions, different selves. You are old enough to be expected to know who you are, yet young enough to feel that identity slipping through your fingers every other week.

Maybe that is why Cavafy’s poem feels so comforting. It reminds us that the uncertainty is not a failure of the journey: it is the journey.

We tend to imagine life in a very linear way when we are young. We think there will be a moment when everything clicks: the right career, the right relationship, the right apartment, the right version of ourselves. We think Ithaca is where clarity begins. But maybe what the poem suggests, is something gentler, and perhaps more true: that the value of Ithaca lies partly in the fact that it gives shape to the wandering.

Because what is Ulysses without the voyage? What is home without the years spent learning what home is not?

In your twenties, it is easy to feel behind. Someone is always more certain, more successful, more settled, more in love, more accomplished. Social media only amplifies this illusion, turning everyone else’s path into something polished and purposeful. Meanwhile, your own life can feel messy, delayed, full of false starts and contradictions. But maybe the problem is that we have been taught to worship arrival.

Cavafy proposes something radically different: do not hurry the journey.
Not because the destination does not matter, but because the road is where you gather what will allow

you to recognize it when you get there.

In your twenties, the detours are often the point. The wrong job teaches you what kind of life you do not want. The heartbreak teaches you what love cannot be built on. The lonely city teaches you self- reliance. The friendship that changes you, the book that arrives at the right time, the failure that humbles you, the risk that surprises you... these are not interruptions to the path. They are the path.

And perhaps Ithaca itself evolves as we do.

At twenty, Ithaca may look like success. At twenty-two, it may look like freedom. At twenty-five, peace. At twenty-seven, belonging. We think we are chasing one fixed destination, but often what changes most along the way is our understanding of what home, happiness, or fulfillment even mean. The place we are destined for may not be exactly the place we imagined when we first set sail.

That does not make the dream less beautiful. If anything, I believe it makes it more human.

There is also something deeply reassuring in the fact that Ulysses’ journey was not efficient. It was not optimized, curated, or strategic. It was long. Complicated. Imperfect. He lost things. He suffered. He changed. In a culture obsessed with five-year plans, productivity, and becoming your “best self” as quickly as possible, I believe there’s something human in embracing slowness, in allowing life to unfold through discovery rather than control.

Maybe our twenties are not supposed to feel like arrival. Maybe they are supposed to feel like sea. Like movement, and doubt, and wind, and wonder.
Like leaving one shore without yet seeing the next.
And maybe that is not something to fear, but something to cherish.

Because one day, we will look back and realize that the years we thought were scattered, were actually forming us with extraordinary, unexpected precision. That every encounter, every mistake, every longing, every beautiful distraction gave us something we could not have learned any other way. That the road was shaping us.

Cavafy’s poem does not tell us to give up on Ithaca. On the contrary, it tells us to keep it always in our minds. To let it guide us. To let it call us forward. But it also warns us not to rush, because rushing would mean missing the very richness that gives the destination its meaning.

So yes, maybe in our twenties we are all a bit like Ulysses. We are searching for something we cannot fully name yet. A place that feels true. A life that feels like ours. A version of home that is not simply inherited, but discovered.

And until we reach it, maybe the task is not to panic. Maybe the task is to travel well.

But then again, what do I know? I am still figuring out what my Ithaca is.