How I Found Momentum When I Couldn’t See My Future

Act III: Direction

I stopped walking.

I still don’t know why.

How long I stood there did I stand there?

Time simply disappeared one warm Michigan spring afternoon in May. I was walking across the corporate campus where I worked. Objectively, life looked pretty good. I had a good job working in food service at a multinational corporation. Decent pay, good benefits, great hours. The kind of job most people would be happy to have.

The sun was warm. The grass was lush and green. Cars flowed steadily along the busy road just beyond the campus. Everything looked… normal.

I stared toward the road, and something happened that I still struggle to explain. Somehow, I was already there, experiencing my last day on Earth. Zero momentum.

Ten years.

Fifteen.

Twenty.

I could see exactly where my life was headed. The same work, same routine, walking down the same path to the same building. The same version of me with nothing changing.  “Is this it…?”, I thought.

That moment destabilized me.

A woman from the office walked by.

“Hey! How’s it going?”

I liked her and couldn’t explain what was happening. I wanted to look okay so I mumbled something I don’t even remember.

She stopped.

“Are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

I most certainly wasn’t.

I finished my workday pretending everything was fine. Everything was not fine. The drive home felt surreal. I don’t remember much of it. A zombie just going through the motions. I kept replaying what had happened over and over.

How do you even explain something like that?

I couldn’t.

I carried it alone.

Then a realization from the campfire months earlier quietly resurfaced.

“If you want things to change, you have to do things differently.”

When that thought first came to me, it felt interesting. Now it felt urgent. The problem was that I couldn’t see where I was going. I wanted direction before I moved. Life seemed to be asking me to move before direction appeared. That was the loop I had been stuck on for years.

For almost a year, panic attacks had become a regular part of my life. Most nights, they arrived just as I was starting to fall asleep. Going to bed had become something I approached cautiously. Would tonight be another one?

I’d crawl into bed around ten, turn the lights off, get comfortable, and just as I was drifting toward sleep, the smallest thought would drift into my mind. Something completely insignificant. A random idea. A passing thought. Then my brain would grab it and sprint, and within seconds I’d be convinced I was about to die.

My heart would pound. I’d start hyperventilating. Adrenaline exploded through my body. Absolute terror.

I often suffered through it silently, other than the days where it would end in screams. There was no escaping it. Every single time I genuinely believed those were my last few moments alive.

Then…

As suddenly as it arrived, it would begin fading.

I’d find myself crying, relieved that I hadn’t died after all. I’d go back to bed and hope I could fall asleep. That wasn’t until two in the morning or so. The alarm still went off around five. Then I’d do it all again. Night after night.

I had absolutely no idea what was happening to me.

Was something medically wrong? Maybe I was losing my mind… What about stress or anxiety? Was it the job or was it me? I had no answers.

I started searching for anything that might help me move forward. At first, I was just looking for motivation. How do I show up better and stay disciplined? How do I get out of whatever this is? That’s when I stumbled across life coaching. They had some good tips, but honestly, my first impression was that it sounded completely ridiculous.

I pictured some hippie helping the house wife  discover better vibes, sitting beside the swimming pool of their multi-million dollar mansion, while birds chirped in the background. The Hollywood movie version.

Why the hell would anyone pay someone else to tell them what to do?

The more I read, the more I realized I had completely misunderstood it. Coaching wasn’t about advice, or about someone pretending to have all the answers. It was about helping people understand themselves and see blind spots. Helping them make decisions that aligned with who they really wanted to become. That resonated deeply with me.

For the first time, I could imagine helping people before things got really bad, and before they reached the kind of hopelessness my brother had experienced.

I researched different coaching schools, trying to separate what felt genuine from what felt like marketing. Eventually I found one that simply made sense and after one conversation, I knew.

It wasn’t cheap. I honestly don’t think the price mattered. I wasn’t buying a course, I was buying hope. Well would you look at that… Movement!

I first felt relief, very closely followed by “What the hell did I just do?”. Apparently this was happening now.

Something unexpected happened over the following couple of months. The panic attacks didn’t disappear overnight, but they became less frequent. I didn’t understand why. Nothing had changed other than being more consistent with workouts and eating better. I slept through a night without panic. Then another. Eventually I realized change was happening.

It would take me months to understand what had happened. For almost a year my nervous system had been screaming because I couldn’t see movement anymore. Coaching didn’t give me a destination. It gave me a direction. That was enough and changed everything.

I decided to do something that felt completely unlike me. I took a week off work. Told my wife I’d be gone and would be coming back in a week. That was about as much planning as I had. For someone who normally planned everything, this felt enormous.

No destination.

No reservations.

No itineraries.

I left on that July morning just me and my ruby red Ford Focus hatchback, packed with camping gear and snacks. Ok, so a touch more planning.

When I reached the end of my street, I had my first decision to make.

Left… Or right?

I went left.

It sounds ridiculous now, but it was the first truly unplanned decision I’d made in years. Every decision after that happened the same way. Optimal? Who knows? I was leaning heavily into intuition and feeling. Every decision leading to the next. I stopped trying to figure out the whole trip.

A decision takes milliseconds to make. Overthinking can take forever.

I’d drive until something felt interesting. Then I’d turn. Rinse, repeat.

I started in south east Michigan and ended in the North Carolina mountains that day. At some point it was dark and I needed to stop somewhere. Anywhere. I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway and my headlights lit up the sign for the Mount Pisgah Campground. “Wow, the Universe does have my back.” I turned in, relieved, and grabbed an empty spot figuring I would square up the next day. Worst case I leave and find another spot.

If anyone had been watching me pitch that tent, they would have assumed it was my first time seeing fabric. The stars and the waning crescent moon were barely any help. By the time I finished, I didn’t care what it looked like, I just wanted somewhere to sleep.

As I lay there, one thought crossed my mind, “I wonder what tomorrow holds…”. I smiled. Mostly because I hadn’t Googled the nearest hotel and bailed. I also found a spot and was doing the damn thing.

The next morning I was up before anyone else in the campground. Dawn had barely broken and the place was silent. Coffee was the first mission and then figuring out my next move, so I unzipped the tent and stepped outside.

I stopped.

I was surrounded by Catawba rhododendrons.

Pink. White. Everywhere.

During the night I had unknowingly pitched my tent inside what felt like an alcove of blooming flowers. I slowly turned in a circle, taking it all in. Then I chuckled. I just stood there laughing.

“What do I know?”

Maybe I didn’t need to have every detail figured out.

“Of course…”

If I had planned this trip, there isn’t a chance I would have picked this campsite. I couldn’t have. I didn’t even know it existed. Yet somehow I’d stumbled into something far better than anything I could have planned myself. It felt like the Universe was quietly whispering, “You’re on the right track.”.

I believed it.

That morning I decided my quest would be to visit every waterfall within driving distance during the week.

One that had stood out was Skinny Dip Falls. The name had challenged me the day before. One morning before sunrise, I accepted. Walking through that forest alone, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.

Safety.

The trees, silence, and smell of the forest. Nature didn’t feel indifferent. It felt welcoming, like I belonged there. I got to the falls, got undressed, and tucked my clothes beside a rock. Fortunately, the only witnesses were trees, and they kept my secret. The moment felt strangely sacred.

Then I jumped.

A fleeting thought crossed my mind.

“Please tell me there are no families deciding to take a morning stroll.”

The cold stole my breath. I instinctively gasped for air as every nerve in my body lit up. The shock ripped through every layer of comfort and certainty I had been carrying, bringing me instantly back to aliveness.

Raw and immediate.

For a brief moment, there was nothing else.

Presence.

No expectations.

I laughed. “What the fuck am I doing?”

Living.

A divine moment.

I only know that something inside me woke up. A part of me that had been sleeping for a very long time. A part that understood I was capable of far more than I had allowed myself to believe.

That week was filled with moments like that. Moments that couldn’t be planned, or forced. Moments that only existed because I had been willing to take a step without knowing where it would lead.

Toward the end of the week, I pulled into one of the overlooks along the Blue Ridge Parkway near the campground. The sun was beginning to set. Layers of mountains stretched into the distance. The horizon seemed endless. I sat in the grass overlooking the valley and simply took it in.

In the distance I could hear engines revving. Drivers gathering at the top of the switchbacks waiting for darkness before racing down the mountain roads. Headlights occasionally flashing through the forest in the valley below. Apparently not everyone came to the mountains for quiet reflection.

I sat there thinking about risk and uncertainty. About all the things I had avoided throughout my life because I was afraid of not knowing.

And then it happened. The dream I had buried almost twenty years earlier returned.

Not gently or vaguely.

Clearly.

“Oh yeah…”

The sailboat in the marina with the satellite dish. The dream I had convinced myself was impossible almost twenty years earlier. I had buried it beneath a version of myself that wasn’t ready to believe.

I wondered why I had shut it down so quickly and why I had carried that limitation for so long. Why, why, why…

Then another realization arrived. The dream hadn’t been dead. Over the course of that week, I had been slowly exhuming the version of myself who was capable of believing in it. Uncertainty had always meant danger to me. Somewhere during that week I stopped trying to control everything. By the time I left North Carolina, uncertainty had become a place where possibility lived.

I still didn’t know how any of it would happen. I still didn’t know when. It wasn’t practical. It wasn’t guaranteed. And for the first time, I didn’t need those answers before taking the next step.

The dream wasn’t what had changed.

I had.

Instead of asking myself whether someone like me could ever do something like that, I asked a different question.

What’s step one?