The Search Was the Journey

For most of my life, I thought I was searching for the path.

Twenty years ago, if you'd asked me what I was searching for, I probably wouldn't have had a simple answer.

I was a volunteer EMT. I studied criminal justice and trained toward becoming a police officer. I served with a heavy-rescue ambulance corps and became involved in my community.

But those were only some of the things I was doing.

Underneath all of it, I was searching.

I explored religion, philosophy, psychology, self-help, meditation, alternative ideas and different ways of understanding ourselves and the world around us. I joined organizations, attended conferences, read, studied, listened and experimented.

There always seemed to be another question.

And underneath most of those questions was one very big one:

What is my purpose?

Trying to Find My Thing

For a long time, I thought one of my problems was that I wasn't particularly good at anything.

The evidence seemed pretty convincing.

I'd been a retail worker, stock boy, salesman, carpenter, cabinet maker and installer, printer, manager, landscaper, bartender, cook, waiter, mechanic and handyman.

I became a paramedic and eventually a registered nurse.

Along the way I was also an instructor, actor, singer, comedian, video editor, Uber driver, college student, volunteer, Little League coach, musician, father to three daughters—and eventually a grandfather.

Some of those things were jobs. Some were hobbies. Some were experiments. Some I learned through formal education, and others I simply decided I wanted to understand and taught myself.

For years, all those different directions seemed like evidence that I hadn't found my thing.

Eventually, I began to wonder whether I had been looking at the evidence backward.

What if I was never supposed to be only one thing?

Maybe Purpose Isn't Singular

That changed the way I began thinking about purpose.

A physical object can have more than one purpose.

A piece of wood might become furniture, a tool, artwork, fuel—or something its original maker never imagined. Its purpose can change over time. It can even have a completely different purpose depending on who is holding it.

Why should a person be any different?

I spent years trying to discover my purpose as though there were one correct answer hidden somewhere and I simply hadn't searched hard enough to find it.

Today, I don't think I have one purpose.

I think I have an unlimited number of them.

I can have different purposes during different parts of my life. I can serve different purposes to different people. And tomorrow may reveal a purpose I don't even know exists today.

That realization changed another assumption I'd carried for much of my life:

We can mistake the limits of what we currently understand for the limits of what is possible.

Some of the most important things in my life were once things I didn't even know to search for.

Learning to Be Here

About ten years ago, someone introduced me to an idea that would become another major part of my personal journey:

The present moment.

It sounds incredibly simple.

For me, it wasn't.

I began exploring meditation, mindfulness, focus and awareness. Eventually I began to understand that being present wasn't merely an idea.

The present moment was an actual place I could be.

When I'm moving through life on autopilot, I can look at something without really seeing it. My brain recognizes it, categorizes it, associates it with something else and moves on.

When I deliberately become present, the same thing can suddenly contain details I hadn't noticed before.

Nothing around me necessarily changed.

My attention did.

I'm still practicing.

Stress can put me back on autopilot remarkably quickly. Old reactions can arrive before I even recognize what's happening. Being present doesn't magically eliminate anger, anxiety or difficult emotions.

But sometimes it gives me something extraordinarily valuable:

A moment to think before I react.

I don't expect to live completely in the present. I don't think that's realistic.

But I've experienced peace there.

So I keep practicing.

Looking Back Differently

There were periods of my life that felt scattered.

I changed directions. I tried things. I abandoned things. I started over. I succeeded at some things and failed at others.

For a long time, I could look backward and interpret all that movement as evidence that I hadn't found the path.

I see it differently today.

I don't know whether everything in life happens for a reason.

I don't need it to.

But I do believe that the things we've experienced don't have to remain meaningless.

We can learn from them. We can reinterpret them. We can build something from them.

And somewhere along the way, I realized:

For years I thought I was searching for the path. I didn't realize the searching was part of the path.

That doesn't mean I've stopped searching.

Quite the opposite.

I've just stopped believing that searching always has to end with an answer.

Sometimes it leads to another question.

Sometimes it changes what I thought I knew.

And sometimes it reveals something I never knew enough to look for in the first place.

The Purpose I Chose

After spending so much of my life asking “What is my purpose?”, there's something wonderfully strange about finally choosing one for myself.

Discover the Journey is my vision.

It's something I want to build from everything I've learned, everything I've tried and everything I still haven't discovered.

It isn't my only purpose.

I'm a husband. A father. A grandfather. A nurse. A maker. A friend. A student. A teacher. A thousand other things depending on the day and the person standing in front of me.

But Discover the Journey is different.

It isn't the purpose I finally found. It's the purpose I chose.

And I hope someday it becomes part of my legacy.

Not because I need millions of people to know my name.

I'd rather they discover something about themselves.

If something we've created here helps one person feel included, safe enough to search, comfortable asking a question, willing to consider another perspective, or curious enough to discover something they never knew to look for, then something I created mattered to somebody else.

And after all these years, perhaps one part of me hasn't changed very much.

I still want to feel needed.

If one person gets the message, I will.

The Discovery

If I could sit across from the younger version of myself today, I wouldn't give him all the answers.

I couldn't.

There are answers I still don't have.

I'd tell him to live.

Try to become present. Stay there as long as you can.

Pay attention.

Keep searching—but leave room for what you aren't searching for.

Some of the most important things in your life may be things you don't even know exist yet.

You are the best person in the world at being you.

This life belongs only to you.

And if someday one of my grandchildren reads this after I'm gone, there's one more thing I'd want her to know:

You are never truly alone unless you choose to be.