It has taken me a long time—and a road that has led me through countries, marriage, fatherhood, business successes and failures, belief in love, a soccer team and God—to face the truth that for much of my life, I have lived in its ideal and not in its reality. I have been really good at sticking pictures of the ideal up on the walls that line my brain, keeping them there to look at whenever I chose. What I was less good at—because I didn’t know how to do it—was engaging with what I was actually doing and who I am, and then grounding that into something real.

What changed? Well, what changed was that it took real pain to shake me up. Like the adages of "What doesn’t kill us, etc., etc." and "You don’t know what you’ve lost, etc., etc." and "You learn more from your failures, etc., etc.," for me it was having two small children and a failed marriage at the same time that screamed at me to learn how to process life into meaning.

There was this moment, when my children were four and two, and I was alone with them a lot. I had heard that children need us to be grounded to ourselves so they can understand how they need to be grounded to themselves, but I couldn’t fully connect with that yet. And there they were, sitting in the outward-facing seat of my Volvo station wagon as I strapped them into their seat belts. I stood back for a second and looked at them: two wonderful, beautiful, holy gifts of life. The smaller one looked at me, all eyes and lips. “Daddy,” he said. “Daddy,” he repeated. “Daddy,” one more time. “Daddy, will you close the f-----g door?” That grounded me (he was too young to be grounded himself). That connected me, engaged me in an instant. Who was I if he could say that? There was work to do.

What I know is that having my life mean something to me—having my voice come from me and have it heard; have my ideas, thoughts and contribution as work put out into the world (I think that when you die, God wants to see your portfolio)—is what makes my life seem relevant to me, and I hope it gives my children an example for them to process for themselves.

The problem is that the more I become conscious of myself, the more I see unconsciousness in others. Not that we mean to be unconscious; not that we mean to be ungrounded. We don’t. We just move through our lives as best we can. What I believe in so deeply, however, is that each of us is the truest source of discovery for each other. One of us can pull another of us toward that place where the work can start or continue. It takes sharing and honesty. We are all growers and we are all nomads, and life unfolds for all of us. Sharing our stories may play a part for one of us, helping us to understand something that we never have before. If history is testimony, then living is a testimonial to journeys of different types and different lengths. This is just mine.