The Odyssey And The Cruelest Journey

Even if you are unaware of it, each journey you go on will provide you with personal insight and will make you apprehend things you may have never previously known about yourself. The three main reasons that compel people to go on journeys is physical, spiritual, and mental. Although at first, people might go for the fun of it or out of boredom, towards the end, everyone discovers something about themselves that they never knew. One of the reasons people go on journeys are physical reasons. This could be because people want to test the limits of what they can do. An example of this can be seen in “The Cruelest Journey”, when Salak went on a 600-mile journey in a kayak that nobody has ever completed and there wasn’t anybody who was sure if she would even survive (Salak 422 line 20). “My journeys feel ludicrous, at worst insane. This one is no exception” (Salak 421 line 1). Another example of this can also be seen in “The Odyssey”, when Odysseus was going back to home after

People go on mental journeys to make themselves feel mentally fulfilled, see the limits of their mental ability, and just to make themselves feel proud of themselves. In “The Odyssey”, Odysseus went with some of his men to see the cyclops, and during the encounter he had to use a lot of his mental “strength” to formulate a plan in which he said his name was nohbdy and outsmarted the cyclops (Homer 380 line 275). In “The Cruelest Journey”, Salak went on a journey which took a lot of mental preparation and the more people doubted her, the more she wanted to do it, “When a person tells me I can’t do something, I’ll want to do it all the more” (Salak 422 line 27). “The Real Reasons We Explore Space” spoke about how America wanted to always be the first person to do something and to also be the best at it, “First, most of us want to be, both as individuals and as societies, the first or best at some activity”(Griffin 434 line