Four Movements for a Life in Transition

Prelude

There are all kinds of disruptions that come in life. Most come from the outside, but a few come from within. Of those that come from within, so many are an extension of our emotional baggage—a burning desire to rid ourselves of the unavoidable, existential sludge that seems to keep growing on us as we get older.

Being on the edge of turning 50, I’m totally in the target market for a mid-life crisis. This should make me immediately suspect of any impulses to upend my life or make any sudden changes.

This was my first reaction as I started to get these glimpses of a desire to move—not just across town, but the kind of movement that resists an obvious destination. As my heart started telling me I needed to untether, I was skeptical. Radical simplification, it said. Purge everything but the absolutely necessary. Learn how to live with less and begin to move out into the world. Focus on experience and adventure and connection and beauty. This felt like one of those memoirs you read about—the guys who sell all their belongings and go live in the woods.

Yet, I couldn’t ignore or dismiss the feeling. Every time I cleared away the noise and distraction, there it was—this unyielding restlessness whose embers continued to smolder in the pit of my soul. It wasn’t calling me to be reckless, but it wasn’t calling me to play it safe either. It wouldn’t abate, and it wouldn’t let go. It just persisted with this slow burn.

I’ve started to accept the fact that this restlessness will not simply go away. In fact, I’m starting to concede that this is a pointer to what’s next—one that perhaps raises more questions than answers, but a compelling pointer nonetheless.

However, to accept a call is to honor its claim on your life. Otherwise, it’s not really true acceptance. But honoring this call is a radical shift—one that requires a shedding of the old skin. A putting off of the old self. The self that has woven a web of comfort out of the threads of existence that allowed me to feel the most in control in this chaotic world. This is a meditation on the dismantling of those threads, one strand at a time.

Movement I: Clarity

Clarity is number three on my list of values. I’ve spent a lot of my life wanting some level of confidence or assurance when it comes to stepping out in “faith.” The desire to do something more significant with my life started to break this need. When I learned that people like Jeff Bezos and Colin Powell needed no more than about 40% confidence before taking action, I started questioning why I drag my feet on so many things—waiting to know before moving forward.

Left to my own devices, I will sit forever until the answers come. Until clarity comes through some kind of revelation. But the lesson life has been teaching me repeatedly is that more answers come through motion than meditation.

For five years, I have watched my expectations get kicked in the shins more times than I can count. That’s not totally fair. While I lived through COVID, being alienated from my kids, and being disillusioned by my career—I’ve also made a life-changing move to Texas, discovered a wonderful community of friends, and ignited new passions that I had been denying for years. Bottom line: in 2020, I could have never predicted what my life would look like five years in the future. I definitely tried. Most of my predictions were wrong.

Now that I precariously dance on the edge of a new season—a new future—this ambiguous sort of burning within demands both an honoring and a reckoning. One that doesn’t afford the convenience of confidence or clarity.

I don’t know much about this longing besides the fact that it’s there and it’s persistent. It will not be ignored. In the quiet moments when all else is stripped away, there it remains. It’s different from other impulses I’ve experienced—even impulses that have pushed me to abandon my present situation. I can’t easily quantify how it’s different. Perhaps because I don’t feel an urge to escape. Just a desire for motion.

I’m okay with naming what I don’t know. Where we’re supposed to go. Why we’re supposed to go. What any of this means. What we’re supposed to learn. Who we’re supposed to connect with. Not even what direction to head in.

But I’m gradually accepting

that there is so much we really don’t know—so much we can’t know. And in the end, no matter what we think we know, it doesn’t change what we can actually control. Knowing just lulls us into a false sense of safety because we think we know exactly how things are going to go. It almost never works that way. And the bigger the thing, the less likely it is to go how we expect it to.

What actually scares me most at this point is not even moving without understanding, but not moving at all. That I will let the cares and trappings of my current life distract, soothe, or overwhelm. And before long, years will go by and I will be no closer to fulfilling this longing than I am today.

There is a calling on my heart to finally start to live out stepping into the unknown as a practice. A way of life. Not just random individual decisions. So I’m choosing to move anyway—even if clarity doesn’t show up.

Movement II: Security

When I travel for any length of time, I start to feel a certain homesickness. It’s not a longing for home in the belonging sense. In fact, there has never been a place I’ve encountered that felt like “home.” What I start to miss is just a place to call my own. A desire to live out of something other than a suitcase. To feel rooted. Grounded.

When we first moved to Texas, I felt so anxious and stressed because I wouldn’t feel settled until we found a house. I needed to tether myself to something. I needed the security of knowing that I had a place to return to. A place that was mine.

So much of my orientation—my sense of self, my ability to function—has revolved around knowing my place in the world. Not just in the existential sense, but literally: where I wake up. Where I return to.

Home, for me, has always been a fixed point. A center of gravity. Not because the place itself made life feel more real, but because of what it provided: routine, rhythm, predictability. A way to move through the day knowing what the next step was and where it would happen.

Every time I’ve been away from that fixed point—on the road, in transition, between places—I’ve felt disoriented. Ungrounded. The suitcase sitting on the bed in front of you is your whole world. It’s the only thing that’s really yours. It’s not just hard to rest. It’s hard to be a person.

I’ve struggled to know how to build a meaningful routine without first knowing how to navigate a familiar space each morning. Without the anchor, even simple acts—like writing, resting, and praying—feel slippery.

I now see how home has always been the focal point around which my sense of stability, expectation, and routine have orbited. Without that fixed point, I don’t really know how to orient myself. And over time, life starts to blur.

What’s wild is that this happens even when I am at home—especially now, with the kids gone. The house is still here, but the center has shifted. The old rhythm doesn’t hold like it used to.

I think the real lesson here is that I need to learn how to fix the things that matter into my life regardless of where I am. And maybe the reason some of those things shake loose is because they were never actually rooted in me to begin with. They were add-ons—extensions of my role, my environment, my routines. They made sense in that old orbit, but they’re not tethered to the core of who I am.

That doesn’t make them disingenuous. Just fragile. They were habits planted in loose soil.

And so I’m learning to let go—not of rootedness entirely, but of the illusion that it has to come from something outside of me. I anticipate a struggle. This is new, and my entire life has been built around knowing what to expect. I don’t expect my heart to let go quite so easily.

This isn’t to say that I won’t come back to the need for roots at some point. But in this season, a significant part of the longing I’m feeling is to leave that life behind for the time being. There are bigger things to look to out there in the world. Adventure. Connection. Beauty.

Movement III: Affinity

I’ve always had a hard time when it comes to relationships. There was a long stretch where I didn’t really have any meaningful connection outside of my marriage. And for a while, I didn’t feel the need to fix that. Having Ashley’s friends and family nearby—people I could float in and out of—let me convince myself I was connected enough.

Moving to Texas changed all of that. We landed in a place with no built-in community. Creating a circle of friends wasn’t just emotionally helpful—it became essential for survival. And while God has graciously brought incredible people into my life, it’s stirred something I hadn’t expected.

I disconnected from community a long time ago because I invested deeply in my relationship with others only to end up feeling like a hole was punched in the boat once disparate ideas or life choices entered into the mix. Suddenly, I felt alienated. Like I wasn’t accepted. Like I didn’t belong. An old wound started to bear down on my life again. You don’t belong. You can have relationships, or you can be yourself. Not both.

Having friends again requires being vulnerable. But more than this, it forces a reckoning with the possibility that people might still love me even if I’m a broken mess in front of them. That people open their lives to me simply because I’m me. Something I’m still struggling to accept. I’m afraid to engage more with the world and with relationships because I’m afraid that allowing people to see who I really am will create disconnect and strife—that disagreements over major issues will break the affinity and cripple relationships.

I have found myself holding back. Refusing to go all in—not just with my friendships, but also in my community—because of this fear.

The pull to make significant changes in my life—changes that defy suburban, American, and even Western norms—brings this fear full circle. Not only am I being challenged to move through the world, but to engage with it more deeply. Alienation and isolation from the people I care about is a worry that lingers constantly behind the scenes.

I recognize that the tension is there not because of an unfounded reality, but a very prevalent one. You will be misunderstood. People you care about will not get it and may even think you’re out of your mind for considering some of the crazy things going on in your head. It’s just a question of when.

I’m finally accepting that being misunderstood and being unloved are not the same thing. You can choose to be the person of grace who leans in and loves, even when people don’t understand or agree. To love no matter what. To risk being wounded and love anyway.

I’m choosing commitment as the currency of relationships. Not affinity. Not proximity. Commitment is the lifeblood of relationships that you can always choose. I can choose to truly offer myself to others as I am—even if it’s sometimes ugly.

The challenge is to be open to new connections while at the same time truly striving to maintain the ones I have and the ones I make along the way, as I move throughout the world.

Movement IV: Serenity

For a long time, I assumed that serenity could be attained by creating a peaceful environment. If you could imagine a cabin on a lake, or a cottage on the beach—water gently pulsating, a quiet stillness in the air, not a soul to be found—that’s my happy place. It’s a place I’ve often tried to curate in my life. At least in spirit.

I have a very low tolerance for noise, chaos, and disruption. It grates on me in a nails-on-chalkboard sort of way. My life has often been oriented around finding the next moment of serenity—pining for the opportunity to escape this chaotic world into a place of peace. If I can make my outer world calm, then the inner world will be calm as well. It might sound like an exercise in denial, but this actually works for me.

As I’ve been thinking about why I try so hard to curate calm and serenity in my life, I realize that noise and chaos are so unsettling because they drill into my brain the message that I live in a world out of control. That life often descends into madness, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

The idea that I’ve found serenity only when I stop fighting is a compelling one. It reveals how often I’ve experienced peace only by creating environments where there was nothing left to resist—no chaos, no disorder, no entropy creeping in every five minutes. Just stillness, because nothing was threatening it.

But there’s another kind of serenity I’ve stumbled into—the kind I’ve found in some of the most chaotic places. I remember being at Elsewhere, a popular hangout here in San Antonio, on a Friday night by myself. It was hot. It was loud. The music was blasting. It was frustrating at first—I had to settle for the corner of a bench at a table full of people. But I decided to wait for a better spot. Eventually, one opened up, and I took it. And when I did, the chaos could continue to rage around me, and I didn’t care. It all became white noise. I read my book peacefully. And it was beautiful.

For a guy who loves peace, quiet, and serenity, you might think it strange that one of my favorite places in the world is New York City. I won’t get into all the reasons why—that would be a post all its own. But there’s an analogy that lives in Times Square, of all places, that has stayed with me.

Times Square is a frenetic mess—packed with tourists, drenched in light, and deafeningly loud. Locals avoid it like the plague, and it’s not hard to see why. It’s crowded (even by New York standards), painfully bright, and absolutely no one knows where they’re going.

Trying to actually get somewhere in Times Square is a nightmare. You’re pushing through immovable clusters of tourists, dodging the lost and the aimless, sidestepping guys hustling you for cash (these days it’s the ones with the rotating cameras), and weaving around endless selfie-takers. It’s maddening.

And yet—for reasons that probably say something troubling about me—I find it fascinating. But only if I stop trying to move through it. You have to stop. Just be there. That’s when it comes alive: the faces, the ethnicities, the wild fashion choices. The conversations, almost none of them in English. Seven or eight languages in two minutes. A roiling, international sea of humanity—and it’s glorious.

I’m seeing that the true beauty of the world doesn’t come from fighting for stillness in it, but from finding stillness in yourself. From being present enough that everything slows down, and the chaos becomes a wave of existence that washes over you—not to consume you, but to surround you. And in that surrender, wonder begins to surface. I’m realizing that even in some of the busiest places in the world, I’ve been able to find the serenity I’ve been seeking all along.

I’ve discovered that serenity isn’t found in a place, but in a state of being. And that’s crucial for this calling to move through the world. The places I will be called to won’t always be mountaintops, lakesides, or gentle forests. Sometimes they’ll be frenetic downtowns. Bustling markets. Riotous pubs. And in all of these places, I can still discover beauty. Joy. Peace.

Peace is not the absence of noise, but the absence of my resistance to it.

Coda

This restlessness has taught me that escape is a longing to get away from something. But honoring this call is something else. It’s recognizing that maybe—just maybe—you’re being pulled toward something instead. Something quieter. Something harder. Something that might ask you to change.

That change doesn’t have to look dramatic. It doesn’t mean selling all your belongings and moving into a van or a cabin or the woods. It might simply mean questioning what you’ve called sacred—and whether it still deserves that name.

Right now, life is asking me to let go. To release the scaffolding I’ve built around my days just to feel safe. Sometimes that means refusing the urge to add one more thing to the pile—one more purchase, one more plan, one more illusion of control—when I know I’m supposed to be lightening the load.

So I’m learning to get quiet. To ask this unyielding restlessness what it needs from me today.
To listen.
To move.
Even just a little.
Even if I still don’t know where it’s leading, I want to follow.