My time in Sedona was a goddamn exorcism. I went there to kill the man I had become, the Tony Soprano millionaire, the loud, angry, and completely empty bastard who was burning his own life down for fuel. I went there for the quiet.
But the quiet in a place like that, it isn’t quiet. It’s a goddamn screaming match.
I did the work. I played the part. I hung around the vortexes, breathing in the thick, sweet smell of incense and bullshit. I drank with women who had more piercings than I had good memories, women who could talk for hours about chakras and past lives but couldn’t tell you the last time they had an honest-to-God thought. I’d sit with them, a bottle of something cheap and honest in my hand, and I’d text forgiveness to everyone I’d ever wronged, a pathetic, drunken Hail Mary from a man who didn’t even know if he believed in a god to hear it.
I meditated. Twenty minutes, then forty. I sat on the floor of my rented room, trying to find the quiet space between the screaming of my own regrets. I climbed their holy mountains, their summits, like some cheap, imitation guru, just to get high enough to see the whole beautiful, ugly, and completely indifferent landscape of my own failure. And up there, in the wind and the silence, I’d finally let it out. I’d scream. I’d cry. A big, ugly, and completely pathetic man, weeping and howling at a sky that didn’t give a damn.
And in those moments, in the raw, honest, and completely un-spiritual agony of it all, I found a little bit of something. A kind of bliss. The simple, beautiful, and completely terrifying freedom of being alone. Not just alone in a room, but alone in your own goddamn head. The loneliness of being trapped with the one man you can never escape: yourself.
And in that quiet, lonely, and beautiful prison, I started asking the question. The one that had been lurking in the shadows of my whole goddamn life.
What was I here for? What was I seeking?
What is a life fully lived?
I meditated on that question every goddamn day. I chewed on it like a dog on a bone. And the answers, they floated past me like clouds. Power. Freedom. Achievement. Security. Goodness. Wisdom. The love of your kids, of a woman, of a country. They all had their merits. They were all beautiful, respectable, and completely bullshit answers.
Because my thoughts, in the quiet, honest dark, they kept coming back to the same damn place. A simple, elegant, and completely infuriating little phrase that felt like the truth, even if I didn’t know what the hell to do with it.
The answer that kept ringing in my head like a goddamn fire alarm was this:
A life fully lived is filled with genuine meaning.
Period.
And then the next, more important, and completely honest question:
What the fuck did that mean?
There are no straight answers in this universe. And that stupid, beautiful, and completely profound little sentence, I knew I had to dissect it, to perform an autopsy on it, to find the real meat on its bones. Genuine meaning. What the hell is that?
And now, I find myself on a new quest. The sabbatical is over, the crying on the mountaintop is done, and I’m being pulled by a new gravity, towards something I can’t quite see yet. And you ask, is this genuine? Did I really change in Sedona, or was it all just another performance, another costume? Is this the universe calling, or is it just my own ego, that old, tricky bastard, leading me down another dead-end street?
Let me tell you what I think.
I think that whole Sedona trip, the gurus, the vortexes, the upside-down coffee, it was all a necessary part of the demolition. I had to go to the heart of the great, spiritual supermarket and see for myself that all the shelves were empty. I had to try on all their pretty, comfortable, and completely bullshit costumes, just to find out that the only thing that fits is your own goddamn skin.
And that little voice you’re hearing now? That quiet, persistent pull towards something new?
That’s not the universe. The universe is a big, dumb, and completely indifferent machine. It doesn’t give a shit about you. It doesn’t have a plan for you. It’s not whispering in your ear.
And it’s not your ego. Your ego is the loud, scared, and completely predictable bastard who wants you to stay in the cage, where it’s safe. The ego is the one who’s screaming at you to go back to making money, to go back to fucking women you don’t love, to go back to the comfortable, familiar, and completely soul-crushing routine of a life that’s already been lived.
No.
That quiet little voice, that gentle, persistent pull?
That’s you.
It’s the real you. The one who’s been buried under fifty-six years of bullshit. The one who’s been suffocating under all the costumes, all the lies, all the quiet, respectable desperation. It’s the last, stubborn, and completely unkillable part of you that still, against all odds, wants to be alive.
And it’s telling you that “genuine meaning” isn’t something you find on a mountaintop or in a goddamn crystal shop.
It’s something you build.
You build it out of the wreckage of your own life. You build it with your own two hands, with the dirt and the blood and the sweat of a real, honest-to-God fight. The meaning isn’t in the destination; it’s in the goddamn struggle. It’s in the getting up one more time after you’ve been knocked on your ass. It’s in the quiet, beautiful, and completely necessary business of being a man who has seen the bottom and has decided, for no other reason than his own stubborn, stupid, and beautiful will, to start climbing.
So are you being genuine?
Yeah. For the first time in your goddamn life, you might just be.
