Why Is My Why So Hard to Figure Out?

I've spent about half my life trying to figure out why I'm here. I think this thought first showed up in high school and then college and it continued off and on for the next few decades. The only way I could get it to slow down was by doing stuff, by keeping "busy."

I think you've probably asked the same thing. What's the point? Am I happy? What's the meaning of all this? Of life?

There's a few dozen variations and if you dig deep enough you'll keep coming back to the root question, which is only one word…

WHY?

I asked it when I was broke. I asked it when I was rich. I asked it when nothing was working and I asked it when everything was working. I asked it on motorcycles and in hotel rooms and in the shower and lying next to my wife in the dark at one in the morning while she slept. I asked it after good days. I asked it after bad days. The question didn't really care where I was, it just demanded to be asked over and over and over again.

But before it stopped, I went looking for the answer in all the places they tell you to look.

Inside.

I read a lot of books. I journaled. I closed my eyes and pictured my future self. I got pretty good at sitting in a quiet room and trying not to think.

None of it gave me what I went looking for. I would feel clear for an afternoon and then I would drive home and the question would be waiting in the driveway.

Eventually I started to wonder if I had been pointed the wrong way the whole time.

The Thing I Want to Talk to You About

I think we have been told to find our purpose inside ourselves, and I think that is a beautiful instruction that just doesn't work. I think the reason it doesn't work is that the thing we are looking for was never in there. It was outside us the whole time, sitting in plain sight, and we walked right past it on our way to the meditation cushion.

I think your purpose has a face. I think it might have more than one.

Let me tell you how I figured this out, because I did not figure it out cleanly. It took me a while and I was wrong for a long time, until the truth tapped me on the shoulder when I was not paying attention.

The Solo Ride

A few years ago I rode a motorcycle across the country by myself. Twenty-six hundred miles, mostly off-road, on a route called the Trans-American Trail. I had wanted to do this for years. I had watched other people do it on the internet for so long that my wife finally told me to stop watching and go. So I packed up and went.

It was beautiful. I want to say that first because I don't want to make it sound like the trip was bad. It was not bad. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever done. I rode through country I will never forget. I was alone in places I had only ever seen in photographs and no one needed anything from me. Nobody knew where I was. I could just be a man on a bike for a while, which was something I had wanted to be for a long time.

And the whole time, I was thinking about everybody else.

I would crest a ridge in Colorado and the first thing my brain did was imagine my wife standing next to me. I would push through a river crossing that genuinely scared me and the first thing I wanted to do was call my boys. I would build a fire at night and sit by it alone and find myself wishing my father-in-law was on the other side of it, telling me one of his stories I had already heard fifty times.

I did not want the trip to be different. I was glad it was happening exactly the way it was happening. I just kept noticing, over and over, that the parts I wanted to keep were the parts I would tell someone about later.

I did not know what to do with that at the time. I finished the trip, rode home in the rain, and went back to my regular life. I told people it had been amazing because it had been. I left out the part where I had been a little lonely the whole time, because I was not sure that detail belonged to the story I wanted to tell.

The Rockies Ride

That adventure bred a lot of excitement, so the next year a bunch of us did something crazy. My three sons, my father-in-law, and a group of guys, eleven of us, rode from New Mexico up and down the Rockies, in and out of all these little mountain towns, all the way to Montana.

We got lost almost every day. We had arguments about which fork in the trail to take that I am pretty sure are not fully resolved even now. It was messy and hard, but it was oh so beautiful. It was at least ten times better than the trip I had done alone.

Think about that for a second. The dirt was the same. My son Manny actually rode the same motorcycle I bought a year earlier, so the machines were comparable. I was the same guy. The only variable that moved was the people, and the experience moved with it by an entire order of magnitude.

This is when I started to suspect I had been pointed the wrong way my whole life. The thing I had been chasing since I was 14, the thing I thought I was supposed to find by going inside, had been sitting on the other side of the campfire.

Your Why Is a Who

So here is the idea, and I will just say it the way I would say it to you if you were sitting across from me.

Your why is a who.

That's it. You can stop searching now. You do not have to find some grand abstract noun to anchor your existence to. You just have to look up from your laptop and notice who is in the room.

And if you want to test this, you can do it in about ten seconds. Think about the last time something good happened or you did something really hard and it worked out. Was it a promotion, or a big deal that closed? Maybe you found out you were having a baby or your offer came back accepted on your first house? Or the day the bad scan came back fine for you or someone in your family?

Whatever it was, now notice what happened next.

You wanted to share it with someone.

That person or those people, that's your answer. The fact that your mind reached for a person and not something else is the data point. Your higher self knows what your purpose is. Your higher self has known this the whole time and that's why you feel a little off when you fail to recognize it.

Pushing the Idea Further

At this point, I'm guessing some of you are nodding along and some of you are getting ready to push back, because it sounds a little soft. It sounds a little Hallmark. Your why is the people you love? Cool, can I get that on a coffee mug? Where is the rigorous theory of meaning?

I get it. I felt that way too. So let me push the idea a little further, because it doesn't stop here.

I noticed this when I went deep on this idea off and on for the past few years. Every person on it was a gift. I did not earn my wife. I met her. I do not know exactly how that happened in any cosmic sense, but the timing of my life and her life was not arranged by me. My sons did not pick me, they showed up at the perfect time. My closest friendships are mostly the result of a hundred small accidents, the wrong job in the right year, the parents who just happened to be on the same baseball team.

Those relationships matter deeply. To me they define the clearest evidence of purpose, but if you keep peeling back the layers, underneath every one of those relationships is a deeper one.

The first relationship. The one that holds the rest together.

God.

The Super Who

That's what I call the Super Who. The who beneath every who. The Creator behind every face you love.

Now I'm going to be straight with you and tell you what I actually believe, and I'm going to do it without a lot of windup. I believe God made us. He's our creator and I believe Jesus Christ is the Son of God and we were built for a relationship with Him.

A real relationship. He wants a conversation with you in your truck on the way to a meeting you don't want to go to. He wants you to bring the questions you wouldn't say out loud in front of anyone else. And He definitely wants you to stop trying to clean yourself up first, because He's already seen the whole mess and is still in the room with you.

(I know that's a lot of theology for a chapter about WHY. But this is where the chapter has been heading the whole time, so I figured I'd just say it.)

Now, with all that said I can understand how some people want "full proof" before they'll even entertain the idea of God. We can't dismiss that. People sit in that seat for years and I have a lot of respect for people who take the question seriously. But I'll be honest with you. When I look at my wife, my sons, nature, the human body, and a thousand other things like the fact that your heart has been beating since before you had a conscious thought, the way forgiveness can heal something, I don't see randomness.

I see design.

And I think skeptics have a much harder time proving the opposite than I would proving this.

The Weight Transfer

Think about this. When God isn't at the center of your life, you don't just get a quiet little theological gap that you can ignore. You get a weight transfer, and the center doesn't disappear, something else fills it. And because we're wired for relationship, the something else is usually a someone else.

So we hand the weight to our wife or our kids. We hand it to co-workers, friends or people we want to be our friends. We start asking those whos to be the foundation of our life instead of the gifts in our life. We ask our spouse to make us feel complete, our children to give us our identity, our work to tell us we matter, our money to give us peace.

And then we wonder why love starts to feel heavy. We wonder why the people closest to us seem to be carrying something they can't quite name.

Humans make terrible gods.

Your wife is a gift. She can't be your foundation. Your kids are a gift. They can't be responsible for your identity. Your business may be the most meaningful work you ever do. It still can't tell you who you are. Your money can buy you a lot of options. It can't buy you peace. And when you ask any of those things to carry weight they weren't built to carry, they start to bend. And so do you.

But when God is the center, everything else gets to become what it was meant to be.

Your wife gets to be your wife instead of your savior. Your kids get to be your kids instead of your scoreboard. Your business gets to be your work instead of your worth. Your money gets to be a tool instead of a verdict. Your freedom gets to be a blessing instead of an escape hatch. The pressure comes off the people you love, because they're no longer being asked to do a job God was supposed to be doing.

That's the Super Who.

This isn't a concept I came up with on a whiteboard. It's a relationship with the One who made you. The One who already knows what you've done and still wants you closer. The One who doesn't need you to perform your way into being loved, which is a wild thing to consider for so many of us. I love this idea: God doesn't care who you were, He cares who you are, right now.

When that floor is solid, the rest of your life can finally breathe.

Back to the Fire

I think back to a fire near the end of my solo motorcycle trip. I was tired and dirty and worn down from 12 hours on the bike. I'd been sleeping rough and alone with my own thoughts for too long. I'd called Kelly earlier and we'd talked about completely ordinary things. The boys. The farm. What was for dinner.

And after I hung up, I sat there watching the fire and finally understood something I'd been chasing the whole trip without knowing it.

This is why.

It's not the motorcycle or the adventure. It's definitely not the achievement of finishing the thing I'd told everyone I was going to finish. It was her and them. The people I loved. The people I wanted to build for. These people were the answer to my WHY.

They had faces.

And underneath those faces was another one. The One I couldn't see but I knew was there. The One who gave me Kelly. The One who gave us our boys. The One who gave me breath and work and land and hunger and grace and another chance every single time I needed one, which has been more often than I'd care to admit.

The One who'd been there in the questions, even the ones I thought I was asking alone.

Your why is almost always a who. And the deepest who, the one underneath every other who in your life, is the One who made you.

That's the Super Who.

That's where your purpose has been hiding all along.