Sometimes in life, you get lost. Sometimes, if you are honest, you realize you have been lost for a very long time.
I have been the latter more often than I care to admit.
I have searched for my path again and again, finding it for a while only to drift away from it once more. If I am going to lean on any metaphor here, it is this one: being lost in the wilderness.
To find your way, you first have to know where you are. You also have to know where you want to go. You cannot navigate from an unknown starting point to an unknown destination.
And even then, the path is rarely straight.
You wander. You backtrack. You veer off into the wild.
I have begun this journey many times, but it only truly begins when you stop lying to yourself and admit where you really are.
A few years ago, I got truly lost.
My second wife died of cancer after a long struggle, and for so long my entire world had been about her. Caring for her. Supporting her. Walking beside her toward the end of her life. There had been no real “me” for what felt like forever. By the time she was gone, I did not even know who I was anymore, but I knew one thing for certain:
I was lost.
It was a moment that called for reinvention and self-discovery, but instead I struggled deeply. I could write about the grief, the anger, and the self-pity, but that is not really what I want to focus on here.
What matters is how I began to move from that place to where I am now.
Because for all the pain and sadness I felt, that season of my life became the defining moment where I slowly began turning back toward living.
My wife was gone, but I was still alive.
And honestly, I did not know what to do with that.
In the aftermath, every unhealthy part of me came forward at once. I drank. I smoked. I tried to fill every empty moment with noise and people because being alone felt unbearable after not being alone for so long. The caretaker in me latched onto anyone with a problem, as if solving someone else’s problems could somehow keep me from facing myself.
But what I actually needed was solitude.
I needed to stop moving long enough to think, to feel, and to recover the calm I had always believed was part of who I was. Instead, everything kept unraveling. I was still functioning on the outside. I still went to work, and I still raised my kids. But inside I felt absent, hollow, and untethered.
Eventually I ended up in Las Vegas on a short trip. It was just after COVID, and the city felt almost like a ghost town. That was not what I went there looking for, but in hindsight it was exactly what I needed.
Walking through places built for excess and distraction, I found something I had not been able to find anywhere else:
Quiet.
For the first time in months, I stopped trying to outrun the void and started examining myself honestly. It was one of the first real moments of clarity I had after my wife died. It was the moment I finally admitted that I did not know what to do anymore.
Once I admitted I was lost, I could also admit something just as important:
I was not happy with where I was.
I had spent so much time and energy caring for my wife and bracing myself for the day I would lose her that I had given almost no thought to what came after. I assumed I would grieve, keep moving, and handle the business of living. What I had not considered was that I would feel purposeless and adrift.
As I watched the Bellagio fountains rise to Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” I started thinking about what I wanted this next part of my story to become.
More than anything, I wanted to be happy again.
Not distracted.
Not numb.
Not simply surviving.
Truly happy.
And I wanted that not only for myself, but for my children as well.
That was where the path began.
Not because I suddenly had answers. Not because everything magically became easier overnight. It did not.
If anything, that moment was really just the beginning of a different kind of struggle.
But it was the first moment where my life began moving in a direction that was intentional instead of reactive. It was the moment where I stopped wandering aimlessly and consciously began deciding where I wanted to go.
What I have discovered since then is that the journey on the path is not separate from the destination. The path itself changes you. The struggle shapes you. Growth is forged in the process of moving forward, failing, recalibrating, and continuing anyway.
When I finally stopped long enough to honestly understand where I was, I could finally lift my eyes to the horizon and begin moving with intention toward the life I wanted to build.
That is the purpose of this project.
I want to write honestly about the journey. About the successes and the failures. About the past, the present, and the future. About health, finances, grief, fatherhood, rebuilding, emotional growth, learning what a healthy relationship actually looks like, and building a life with the woman who now shares this journey with me. Most of all, I want to explore what it truly means to live intentionally.
Maybe no one will read it.
Maybe no one will care.
But if you do, welcome to The Path.
May we all grow together.
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