A journey of exploration, a few sirens, and with a little luck, finding your way home.

Odysseus needed ten years to get home from Troy. He left with a fleet and a victory, and he arrived alone, so changed that his own wife didn’t recognise him. We remember the monsters and all the fighting, but the poem is really about returning: what the journey costs, what it teaches, and who you’ve become by the time you walk back through your own door.

Christopher Nolan has just put the story on the biggest screens in the world, and half of Europe will watch it over the holidays – if you haven’t already as it was out in Belgium last week. So this feels like the right moment to think about your own journey home.

Brussels empties every July. June was the usual madness of events, receptions and deadlines, everything squeezed in before the Great Summer Break, with a World Cup thrown in for good measure. Most of us leave town depleted, wanting to think about anything except work. Fair enough.

Homer saw where that leads, though. Early in the voyage, Odysseus’s crew lands on the island of the lotus-eaters (spoiler alert!). The fruit there is sweet, it makes you forget home entirely, and nobody who tastes it wants to leave. The original all-inclusive beach holiday. I understand the temptation. But nobody writes an epic about the ones who stayed.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting you work during your entire holiday but that summer lets you stop steering for a while. You can swap the focused, stressed gaze of the season for a relaxed and wandering one, and let the questions you never have time for surface on their own, somewhere between a good book and a glass of excellent wine. What actually changed for you this past year? What would your work look like if it gave you energy and purpose? What are you missing?

You won’t answer those questions by staring at them. You answer them by wandering.

Start with a book that has nothing to do with your work. Useful ideas rarely come to life in an obvious way, and a book about belief, or creativity, or how to live will do more for your September thinking than the report you feel obliged to finish or review. Then, if you haven’t already, go and see The Odyssey on the biggest screen you can find, and follow the rabbit hole afterwards. Read about the poem and its strange history, listen to a podcast, or pick up Madeline Miller’s Circe and watch the whole epic again through the eyes of the witch on the island. Rabbit holes are where perspective shifts begin.

Have a coffee with someone you’ve never met and who comes from a different world (a local artist, a medium?). The insights you need are rarely sitting inside your own bubble, and summer is the one season when interesting people actually have time to talk.

Then try a longer conversation with AI. The new voice modes have made this remarkable. You can walk on the beach and talk through whatever you’re wrestling with, challenge the answers, demand better ones, and follow your thinking wherever it goes. Ignore the looks from fellow walkers, or just pretend you’re on a call. It’s a fascinating conversation to have, and to learn from.

And play with the tools. Take one of the structured courses the AI labs now offer (I’ve listed a few below), then set aside the grand debates about superintelligence and build something. A website, a small game, an app you don’t need. Vibe code it. What matters here happens with your hands on the keyboard, when you discover how much of your work these tools can already transform. I’d call it vibe learning. Nobody hands you a certificate. Your curiosity simply compounds in the sun.

Notice that nothing on this list has a serious deliverable attached. In Brussels, that’s almost subversive. The bubble runs on relevance. Every coffee has an objective, every panel has talking points, and every question you ask between September and June is expected to serve a position. It works, but it slowly starves your curiosity. Summer is your permission to ask questions with no obvious purpose. Chase something obscure purely because it caught your attention. Develop an interest you can’t justify to anyone. The connections will emerge eventually, or they won’t, and both outcomes are fine. This is where creativity actually lives: in exploring without needing a result, staying open to whatever the universe puts in front of you. Somewhere in that aimlessness, you rediscover the plain joy of learning. Many in this city haven’t felt it in a while.

Somewhere on this journey you’ll hear the sirens. They’re singing on every podcast right now: AI will end the world, AI will save it, everything is collapsing, everything is solved. Odysseus didn’t plug his ears. He wanted to hear the song, but he refused to let it wreck the ship. So tie yourself to the mast. Listen with curiosity and keep sailing.

Because here’s what we can say about the year ahead. The geopolitics will stay chaotic, the technology will keep creeping into our lives, and the pace won’t slow down for anyone. You can’t predict any of it. You can, however, come back in September more energised, flexible and harder to surprise than you were when you left.

That’s the real destination. In September, Brussels comes back to life. The same desk will be waiting for you, with the same dossiers on it. Ithaca doesn’t change while you’re away. But if the summer has done its work, you’ll be a different person looking at it all. You’ll arrive with fresh eyes, sharper questions and, I’d bet, more energy than you’ve had since last autumn, at exactly the moment everyone else is still blinking away the lotus. That’s when the fun starts: rediscovering your work with real appetite, and beginning to reinvent your job, your organisation, and maybe a small corner of our world.

Get ready to return home in the spirit of T.S. Eliot: the end of all our exploring is “to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

So pack your bags, pick your rabbit holes and see you in September!

What’s the one unrelated book you’re taking to the beach? I’m building my reading list and I want to know.

My summer packing list

Movie: The Odyssey (Christopher Nolan), on the biggest screen you can find.

Books:

Inside the Box by David Epstein, on how constraints make us more creative.

Beyond Belief by Nir Eyal, on the assumptions that quietly limit us.

How to Live a Meaningful Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, on designing days built around wonder, flow and connection.

Circe by Madeline Miller, the Odyssey retold from the island.

This article was originally posted by Philip Weiss on Linkedin