When I left college, I was haunted by the question: what am I going to make of my life now? I had no idea what I wanted or where I was headed, and it terrified me.
For my whole life I had been a student. The path was set to keep moving forward in education, but coming to the reality of that closing chapter and then opening the one that demanded that I know exactly what to do as a career, was daunting and almost seemed impossible. What if I made the wrong choice? How was I supposed to know what was for me?
About this time, I started to hike—a lot. My newfound freedom of no-homework weekends brought me outside every chance I could get. There was not a Saturday I was not rushing out the door with a backpack of granola bars and my worn-down boots.
I became obsessed. I took in some of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen in my life. I found a group of new friends and started to be caught up in their same search for adventure. We would talk about art, writing, business, history, and culture, and losing ourselves in moments under the trees. The forest has a way of making you do that. Every Saturday when I stepped into the wilderness, I let go of worries. And as I escaped upwards, the worry of career and making something of my life got pushed a little bit farther away. It was a beautiful bliss.
After most days and nights out in the wilderness, I would find my way home in the early hours of the morning, my body and mind successfully expressed and de-compressed. It’s in these moments, laying in bed, that my questions would surface again. Riding the small adrenaline high of the day, I would have the courage to turn towards my fears and begin to plead into the abyss: So what now? What am I supposed to do with my life? What’s worth making of my life? Who am I supposed to be? What if I don’t have what it takes to be anything worthwhile?
I lingered and circled on these questions, not knowing where to start searching for answers. They would roll around in my head, my consciousness trying on different scenarios that still always left me with: But is that the RIGHT path for me?
And so, I just kept running towards the next mountain top.
The more I went away in the woods, the more my housemate and long-time friends started assuming my lack of availability. They stopped calling me; I stopped calling them. My adventure started to ripple effect over the people in my life, until one Saturday, late in January, one hike sent my world into a panic.
After an early morning trek around Joffre Lakes in Whistler, B.C. our group spontaneously decided to do another hike—another few hours north in the far corners of Pemberton.
It was already late in the night when we got there. We put on headlamps and shoe spikes and headed into the darkness. We sat for a few hours in the hot springs near a rushing river, chatting with other hikers and staring up at the stars. No cell reception and clear skies left our heads free of worry or responsibility. The day was ending in perfection.
When we finally drove into cell reception very late that night, the little lights behind my phone screen flashed up at me with aggression. Messages and missed calls rushed in. I opened the first one I could get my finger on.
Where are you? Can you call us, we’re worried.
Hey, I just got a message… No one knows where you are. Call me.
Hey, some people are worried about you. Call your roommate!
Are you okay? People are worried about you.
“They think I’m missing!” I exclaimed to the car.
I dialed my roommate instantly.
“Oh my gosh—I’m so sorry—we didn’t have service—I’m okay—I’m so sorry!!”
A big breath let out on the other side of the phone. A forced smile I could hear. A reassurance that I was okay and then, “We hadn’t heard from you since this morning… we were really worried, so we called the police and filed a missing person report.”
WHAT?!
Sitting on the phone, trying to affirm the police we were okay, was like rushing out of the fog. I looked around and wondered, how had I gotten here? How was I three hours from home and completely out of touch with my friends and reality? Both literally and figuratively. The aching feeling I had pushed aside for too long emerged from the surface: I was not finding myself in the mountains, but quite literally, losing myself instead.
I had been running from the things I was too scared to figure out on my own. Adventure in the mountains, while beautiful, had turned into an escape from the big questions in life that were never actually going to go away.
We don’t have answers to the scary unknowns, job losses, changing relationships, unanswered questions, seasons of suffering—so we just run away from the fear of the unknown, unable to tackle the core question of: How do I figure any of this out on my own? What if I make the wrong choice? What if I search and don’t find anything that fulfills me?
Later that week, that same long-time friend who had called the police sat down with me and told me she had felt for a while like she was losing me. She wasn’t a jealous person but all my time had gone towards other people, other things. She was there, waiting for me to come back. Running from my fears had turned into running from my whole life–even the good things.
Fears have a powerful way of taking on the most momentum in life. But when the “tides settled”, I looked around and realized that while I was running away from fear in search of my purpose, I inadvertently stopped being a good friend.
I knew I had to stop running. By doing so, I learned that love is the salve to fear.
There’s this quote my brother got tattooed on his side when he was in high school that has since been seared into my memory: “Perfect love casts out all fear.” For a long time I didn’t really know what this meant, but I was always drawn to it.
I had gotten too comfortable running away from what I feared, but it was my friend, who truly knew and loved me, that tethered me back into reality and tethered back into my truest identity.
Love made my fears grow so much smaller. When love comes from someone who truly, deeply knows us, this love is the safest place we can be, despite any situation.
My friend's love is not perfect, but I do think there is a divine, perfect, mysterious love out there that hears me when I yell into the abyss and somehow makes its way back to me in the small moments of friends calling out a search for me, or telling me they miss me. That love is trying to pull me back in.
I still feel it. The love I feel experiencing marriage and covenant commitment for the first time. The love I feel in the way nature is set up to be an ecosystem that works together. Even the love of a smile from a stranger on the street. It’s in these moments that I can feel my reflection in their kindness that is echoing back to me that I have a place here; I matter.
And lastly, I learned that sometimes trying to hold onto every little thing in life is to my detriment. I cannot guarantee every detail stays in place, every speed bump is avoided, or all the possible outcomes are cleared. I have no idea the way life will turn out or what will come our way.
So what do I hold onto?
I believed then and I believe now that I have a purpose – I think we all do. Our own unique meaning for being on earth at this time in life. Some call it destiny, but I call it divine identity. I believe it’s deeper than happen-chance or effort, but how we are made reveals our purpose.
My value is not what I do or how successful I am. I want to work hard and be proud of myself for those things, but they will always be unchanging. This realization has come with a lot of peace and release from the pressure to figure it out, or do it all on my own. The more I trust this unchanging truth, the more peace and contentment start to be bigger than all the biggest mountains I may face.
