You Can Get There From Here

"I have all this success. What I don't have is a life!" The young executive sitting across the dinner table from me was the picture of prosperity. Youthful, handsome, in radiant health, he appeared to be enjoying the good life. No one among his closest friends or business associates would have dreamed of his uttering those words. To be sure, he was the envy of many of them. Yet there he was, candidly admitting that something very important was missing. What was missing, he was telling me, was his life.

As I listened to him, I knew what he meant. I have at times watched my own life spin away from me in a flurry of appointments, deadlines, trains to catch, programs to prepare, things to do. There have been times when, like my dinner companion that evening, I too have wondered, "Where is my life?"

When that question rears its ugly head, I often feel like I am caught in one of those nightmares where I try and try to get out of a burning room or to run away from a monster, but I cannot find the knob to open the door. The harder I try, the closer to danger I feel. I want desperately to get to safety, but the message of the dream haunts me "You can't get there from here."

How do we get to the place called soul when we feel trapped in our lives?

One of the most important discoveries of my adult life has been the discovery of my having options. I was in my thirties, I guess, before I began to become aware of that ongoing feeling of defeat that comes from a sense of being trapped. For a long time, I couldn't put it into words-it was just there. As time went on, I became angrier, more irritable, for no apparent reason. When I was finally able to find the words to express what I was feeling, I realized that I had spent my life doing what other people wanted me to do and not doing what I wanted. What did I want? I didn't know. I honestly didn't know. All I could tell you was that I wasn't happy.

Looking back on this experience from the vantage point of fifteen years, it is easy to see where it was leading. Now I know that I was being led out of dreams of academia, out of my life in the Jesuits, into the life of a parish priest in the Archdiocese of New York, into communications and radio and public speaking and writing, into a life of real freedom. But back then, I didn't have a clue about any of that.

In fact, had I, in my unfocused anger and dissatisfaction, up and changed my life to the one I have now, I still would not have found my soul. The real change had to be made within. And as I can see fifteen years later, it had to be made in a very special way, not by arbitrarily changing everything all at once.

At the time, however, I had no such clarity of vision. I felt that I was groping around in a peasoup fog. I felt like a failure, and I felt that others thought of me as a failure. Would I ever be able to get out? Would I ever amount to anything?

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