Muthoni Mutonyi

What cities do you want to visit?

I’ve walked through a lot of cities. The crowded metros of Asia where millions of lives intersect in choreographed chaos. The ancient streets of the Middle East where history breathes through every stone. African cities pulsing with color and sound. American cities that reinvent themselves with every generation.

Each one has given me something: a story, a perspective, a memory that resurfaces at unexpected moments.

But there’s one place I haven’t reached yet.

Ithaca

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus spent ten years trying to reach Ithaca, his home island. The journey should have taken weeks. Instead, he faced monsters, shipwrecks, enchantresses who tried to make him forget where he was going, and gods who seemed determined to keep him lost at sea.

Ithaca wasn’t a grand city or a promised land. It was a small, rocky island. But it was his. It was where he belonged. It represented the life he was meant to return to, the person he was meant to be.

I think about that often. Not the adventures, though those matter. But the persistent pull toward home, toward the place where everything makes sense, where you finally arrive at yourself.

I have my own Ithaca. It’s not a destination I can chart on a map. It’s the version of my life where I’ve found my way back to my truest purpose. Where the work I do feels like who I am, not what I’m trying to become. Where I look around and recognize myself completely.

It’s symbolic, yes. But it feels real enough to keep me sailing.

The Long Way Home

The thing about Odysseus’s journey is that every delay, every detour, every encounter with danger or temptation was shaping him into someone who could finally return home. He wasn’t just traveling toward Ithaca. He was becoming the person who belonged there.

I’ve traveled enough to know that most journeys don’t unfold in straight lines. The detours, the storms, the moments when you’re convinced you’re sailing in circles: they’re all part of it. Maybe they’re the point.

There’s a poem by Constantine Cavafy called “Ithaka” that captures this perfectly. He writes that when you set out for Ithaka, you should hope the voyage is long. That you should stop at markets and learn from wise people. That Ithaka gave you the journey, and without her you never would have set sail.

The final lines say that even if you find Ithaka poor when you arrive, she hasn’t deceived you. By then you’ll be so wise, so full of experience, that you’ll understand what all these Ithakas really mean.

Still at Sea

I’ve been to remarkable cities. I’ve stood in places that took my breath away, that challenged how I see the world, that made me feel magnificently small and surprisingly significant at the same time.

But the place I want most to reach doesn’t exist on any map. It exists somewhere in the gap between who I am now and who I’m meant to be. Between the life I’m living and the one that’s waiting for me to find my way back to it.

I don’t know exactly how to get there. The route isn’t always clear. Some days I question whether I’m even sailing in the right direction. Some days the sirens sing, promising easier paths, simpler destinations.

But I keep sailing anyway.

Because maybe that’s what Ithaca really is: not a place you discover, but a place you return to. Not something you achieve, but something you recognize. The version of yourself and your life that’s been waiting for you all along.

Greek poet Cavafy was right. The journey is long. Longer than I expected. Longer than I wanted.

But I’m learning things I wouldn’t have learned on a shorter voyage. Becoming someone I wouldn’t have become if the way had been easy.

I’ve traveled far. I plan to travel farther.

But the journey I think about most is the one I’m still on: the voyage back to my own Ithaca, wherever and whatever that turns out to be.

The sails are set. The island is out there, somewhere beyond the horizon.

I’m still sailing toward home.

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Some places you visit. Others, you spend your whole life trying to reach.