The world doesn’t need more of your hustle. It needs more of you.
There comes a time—midstream, midstride, midlife—when we begin to see it:
This life we’re living isn’t something to escape, outrun, or optimize. It’s something to inhabit.
In youth, I longed for blank spots on the map and believed that freedom lived far from fluorescent lights and payroll meetings. But it turns out the zigzags—the detours, the missteps, the quiet dinners and bedtime stories—were the map. And I was being led all along.
We think we want straight lines. Clarity. Control. But a good story is never that tidy.
It’s forged in the wilderness, in tents during storms, in conversations that crack something open.
As Wendell Berry put it, looking back:
“It seemed I had been wandering in the dark woods of error. But now it looks to me as though I was following a path… unbroken… and I have this feeling which never leaves me anymore, that I have been led.”
To live well now means to pay attention.
To the ground beneath your feet.
To the person across the table.
To the invitations hidden inside what first appears as inconvenience.
There is no arrival. Only a thousand thresholds.
Midlife isn’t a peak; it’s a doorway. The real adventure is now.
So I’ve been asking:
- What part of my story once felt like a mistake but now feels essential?
- Where am I being invited to surrender control and trust I am being led?
- What might it look like to hold my life—not in a white-knuckled grip—but in open hands?
We are not in control.
We are not in a hurry.
The trail may be undefined.
But the invitation is clear:
Step forward. Lightly. Reverently.
And go see for yourself what’s just over the next rise.
Because the world doesn’t need more of your hustle.
It needs more of your presence.
Keep going—
Aaron
