Blog 5: The Way Back Wasn't a Straight Line

In my third blog post, “The Higher I Climbed, the Less I Knew Myself,” I left you where I was that evening at the leadership academy, asked about a list of passions I couldn’t provide. I promised that wasn’t where the story ended. It isn’t. But the way back wasn’t what I expected, and it wasn’t a straight line. The first thing that brought me back to myself wasn’t the Camino at all. It was a field study in Vienna.

By the end of that leadership academy, something had already started to turn. I was building a faculty field study around the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), exploring how they could shape transdisciplinary learning. I led a group of colleagues to Vienna, one of the most sustainable cities in the world, and designed the trip around speakers and tours and experiences that brought the SDGs to life. I presented it at the academy as my capstone. And for the first time in a long while, I was doing the work I actually loved, connecting people and ideas across fields that don’t usually talk to each other. I came home from the retreat reinvigorated and thought I was back.

Here is the part I am least proud of. Feeling like myself again, I used that feeling to chase another title. A promotion opened at another institution, and I told myself I could do even more there. I want you to notice what I did, because it is the whole trap in miniature. I had just been handed a clear warning about what climbing had cost me, and my answer was to climb. The mantra I grew up on, the one I wrote about last time, that it would look good on the resume, was still running quietly underneath everything.

It took about two years for the bill to come due. The loss of purpose returned, and this time it was worse, because now I knew exactly what I was losing and I had walked into it with my eyes open. So I did the hardest and most honest thing I had done in years. I announced I was stepping down.

Stepping down opened a door I didn’t see coming. The institution gave me a semester-long sabbatical before I returned to the faculty, and for the first time in decades I had stretches of time with nothing I was required to produce in them. I read. I rode my bike. I hiked. I let the quiet do some work on me. Three things came out of that season, and together they resulted in my turning point.

The first was the reading. I worked through everything I could find by people who had been where I was. William Bridges on what actually happens when a chapter ends. Richard Rohr on why loss in the second half of life can be generative rather than only painful. Bob Goff on clearing away the noise that keeps you from hearing what you actually want. And David Brooks, whose The Second Mountain I have since recommended to more people than any book I own. Brooks describes a first mountain we climb for status and achievement, and a second one, lower and harder to find, built around joy and relationships and community. After reading him, I finally had a name for what I was missing. None of these books fixed me. What they did was give language to what I was feeling, tell me the feelings were legitimate, and show me that something better could be waiting on the far side of the loss. They were the groundwork. A few of the ones that marked me most are on the resources page at Ultreia.

The second was a decision Amy and I made together. We sold our house in North Carolina and bought one in Lewisburg, West Virginia, to be closer to family and friends. Lewisburg is a small, almost Hallmark-looking town where community is not something you have to create. It is simply there, in the festivals and the front porches and the dozen easy ways to get involved. I wrote last time that I had traded my way out of belonging one rung at a time. This was me trading back. If climbing had carried me away from the people and places where my real life lived, this was a deliberate step toward them.

The third was the Camino. Somewhere in that sabbatical, I flew to Portugal and walked to Santiago. I have written elsewhere about what the walk itself was like, so I won’t retrace all of it here. What matters for this story is that the reading and the move had prepared the ground, and the walk was where it finally broke open. Days of putting one foot in front of the other, of reflection and prayer and the particular honesty that arrives when nobody knows your title, did what no promotion ever could. I came off the Camino knowing, for the first time in years, who I actually was.

And, I can tell you the moment I figured it out. I was at lunch with a group of guys I had just met here in Lewisburg. Somewhere in the conversation it came out that all four of us were musicians. A month or so later I ran into two of them at a local music festival, and by the end of the night both had invited me to play in their bands. I’ve already started rehearsing with one and even had a gig in July.

Hold that next to where I left you in the last post. A man sat in a room at a leadership academy and could not name a single thing he was passionate about. He had to call his wife and his best friend to be reminded that he loved to drum. That same man is now playing in a band in the town where he lives, with people who know him simply as Rob. That is what coming back looks like. It is not dramatic. It is a lunch, a festival, a rehearsal, a gig in July. But it is real, and it is mine.

Here is what I most want you to take from this. The return is possible. I’m proof enough, at least to myself, that you can lose yourself in the climb and still find your way back to the person underneath the title. But I want to be honest about how I did it. I did it mostly alone, by trial and error, and I lost years to a false start I did not have to take. I had my warning in Vienna, and I climbed anyway, because no one was walking beside me to name what was happening and ask me the harder question.

That is exactly what Ultreia is for. Not a program or a platform. A guide who has made this walk, who built the tools because he needed them himself, and who can help you find your way back without spending the years I spent getting lost a second time. You can do this on your own. Plenty of people do. But you don’t have to.

If any of this sounds like where you are standing, for yourself or for someone you care about, I’d welcome a conversation.

Rob is the founder of Ultreia, a coaching and pilgrimage practice for professionals at the threshold of their next chapter. Learn more at www.walkwithultreia.com.