An openness of heart, love, honesty, and the abandonment of the soul are all pathways to the future, for better or worse.

From the moment we are born, the future swings open for us, but for me, there was something missing in my making and evolution that I have been trying to understand all of my life – mostly without success. I had a gift for wanting the wrong things.

It is very difficult to do this alone, but as Joseph Campbell promised, there are magical helpers along the way of life if you take the plunge. He called it the Hero Journey, but I was anything but a hero.

I didn’t understand what I was looking for all those years until I was already getting discounts at movie theaters and at the supermarket on Wednesdays, and big men were opening doors for me. They were telling me more than they knew.

Unless I was ready to tear down the security curtains, rationalizations, and pain I built for myself to protect me from my family, loneliness,  and life, I would never be who I could be and wanted to be. I was born frightened and stayed there.

Unless I was ready to begin all over again and tear myself down, there was a lack of meaning in the here and now that plagued me all of my life. What some call the grace of doubt would die in the wind. Behind would be left all of the unfinished parts of myself.

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My choices were to reclaim my soul or shrivel up, taking with it all of the unfinished. I told a therapist I didn’t wish to have an “if only” life, one full of regret and lost opportunities.  I wanted to find love, meaning that didn’t revolve around money, and a conscience that would actually give comfort and promise to the lives of people who had nowhere to go.

If I failed and didn’t try, I would leave the world in shame and fade away.

Wrote author Joan Chittister, “these are the kinds of moments people look on and sigh, ‘if only’…while the heart beats slower and the present loses another layer of glow and promise.”

This road wasn’t simple. With the call to begin life once more came the challenge of learning what I do and don’t know. The latter was enormous, humility the pass. Every great man or woman I know anything about was humble; this opens the door to understanding.

I worked mostly inside of me, that was where my soul was waiting.

I was never humble, but my life was getting me there. There were things I wanted that I didn’t seem emotionally capable of finding.

I had learned this: To really understand what I was looking for in life, I had to fully understand myself.

That was the hard and painful part, as my wife can testify. I never really liked myself or who I was or what I was doing. This took me to a dreadful breakdown that threatened my life. I had to get back on my feet. I had to love and respect myself if I wanted anyone else to do it. I wanted to sleep without prescription pills.

So it came down, really, to how I wanted to live and how I wanted to die in the short time that remained. My struggles have helped me all along the way.

It seems that failure, in the long run, was the key to success.

I wasn’t going to die within my boundaries. If the call was real, I had to find a way to respond. I never quit.

Today, almost 20 years later, I can say these things: I like myself a lot and will sometimes soon love myself. I have found love for myself and the magical helpers I was looking for found me,  human and animal. I sleep without pills.

I am doing well, happy, busy,  and working with people who want to do the same. I am making the world a slightly better place, using my gifts for good.

Failure inspired me to some success, and getting older moved me faster.

What I wanted was in me all the time. I just had to open myself to getting it into my life.

And reclaiming my soul.

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Many thanks to Joan Chittister, whose writings on aging inspired me to write this series on getting older.