It is worth reading The Spoon River Anthology by the American poet Edgar Lee Masters, especially the poem John Gray. We meet the residents of a fictional small town called Spoon River. We get to know the residents by visiting the cemetery, and the dead themselves read to us the epitaphs on their graves. The epitaphs read like their biographies.

John Gray tells us how he never really lived as he preferred not to take any risks and never left his comfort zone. He compares himself to a boat parked on dry land never touching the sea and never sailing out.

John Gray tells us:

“I have studied many times

The marble which was chiselled for me

A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbour.

In truth it pictures not my destination

But my life.

For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;

Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;

Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.

Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.

And now I know that we must lift the sail

And catch the winds of destiny

Wherever they drive the boat.

To put meaning in one’s life may end in madness,

But life without meaning is the torture

Of restlessness and vague desire

It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.”

On the other hand, in his epic poem The Odyssey, Homer tells us about the final six weeks of the 10-year journey undertaken by Odysseus, King of Ithaca, wandering the Mediterranean trying to get home after the Trojan War.

The poem Ithaka by the Greek poet Constantine Kavafy is about Odysseus’ voyages and search for new lands and experiences:

“As you set you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery...

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all….

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvellous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.”

Life is a voyage, not a destination- Evarist Bartolo

Before he retired out of public life due to cancer, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1982) wrote a farewell letter where he tells us how Ithaka can make us rich in humanity:

“I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would sleep less, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes, we lose 60 seconds of light.

“I would walk when others hold back, I would wake when others sleep, I would listen when others talk…

“I would water roses with my tears, to feel the pain of their thorns and the red kiss of their petals... My God, if I had a piece of life... I wouldn’t let a single day pass without telling the people I love that I love them…

“I would show men how very wrong they are to think that they cease to be in love when they grow old, not knowing that they grow old when they cease to be in love!

“To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own…

“I have learned that everyone wants to live at the top of the mountain, without knowing that real happiness is in how it is scaled…

“I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help the other get to his feet...”

And finally, some advice by Auschwitz survivor Viktor E. Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning:

“Don’t aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself.

“Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long-run ‒ in the long-run, I say! ‒ success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think about it.”

So, we should take our boat out to sea. We must not keep it on dry land. We must go on a meaningful voyage to our Ithaka. Life is a voyage, not a destination. We must do all we can to make the experiences that we pass through enrich our values, talents, and skills so that we can use them to find ourselves and for the common good.

We must let Frankl’s tragic optimism guide our approach to life.

Frankl believes that while we do not choose the historical circumstances of our life, we can choose how to respond to them by “the ability to maintain hope and find meaning in life, despite its inescapable pain, loss, and suffering.”

As he says: For the world is in a bad state, but everything will become still worse unless each of us does his best.

Evarist Bartolo is a former Labour foreign and education minister.