The Journey Inward Is Just as Long as the Journey Out

And I’m still on both.

Years ago, I wrote something down that has stayed with me ever since.

Life is as much an internal journey as it is an external one.

At the time it felt like an observation. Now it feels like the most accurate map I have ever drawn.

What Do You Want?

It sounds like a simple question. It is not.

I have been asking it for most of my adult life and the answer has never stayed still. At different stages it has looked like: a specific job title, a graduate degree, living abroad, seeing a particular corner of the world, learning a new sport, signing up for a triathlon because something in me needed to know if I could.

And then at other times – quieter times, more honest times – the answer has looked like: to be happy. To be at peace. To sit comfortably in solitude. To understand what I actually feel, not just what I am supposed to feel. To be a better person than I was last year. To deepen my gratitude. To keep my empathy intact in a world that quietly discourages it.

Two very different kinds of wanting. And yet somehow they belong to the same life, the same person, the same ongoing question.

But Then There Is the Bigger One

Underneath all of it, one question keeps surfacing. It has followed me across countries, jobs, and stages of life, and it does not seem to be going away:

What is my purpose?

And right behind it, the harder version: if there is no higher calling, no predefined destiny, no plan written somewhere that I simply need to find – then what explains the people who change lives? Who reach something close to greatness in a craft? Who build things that reshape the world?

Did they know? Did they choose it? Or did they simply keep moving in a direction long enough that the direction became the answer?

On Choosing, and Not Choosing

I think about this often – whether what we choose defines us, or whether the things we don’t choose define us just as much. The paths not taken. The doors left unopened. The version of ourselves we decided, consciously or not, not to become.

And then there is acceptance – the quietest and perhaps the most underrated choice of all. Accepting where you are. Accepting what you don’t yet know. Accepting that some questions are not meant to be answered quickly, if at all.

Life is complex. I have made peace with not having all the answers. What I have not made peace with – and don’t think I ever will  – is stopping asking.

What I Keep Coming Back To

Somewhere in all of this searching, one thing has become clear to me. Not as a conclusion, but as a foundation.

Character matters more than almost anything else.

Courage. Integrity. The willingness to keep going when the outcome is uncertain and the road is uncomfortable. The ability to be honest – with others, but especially with yourself. These are not glamorous qualities. They don’t make for a compelling LinkedIn headline. But they are, I think, what a good life is actually made of.

Rudyard Kipling understood this. His poem If has been quoted so many times it risks losing its weight – but read it slowly, and it still lands. It is essentially a manual for character. For what it looks like to move through difficulty, uncertainty, and failure without losing yourself. “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs”  – that opening line alone is a lifelong project.

The poem does not promise success. It promises something quieter and more durable: that if you build the right qualities into how you live, the rest becomes navigable. Whatever the rest turns out to be.

Thinkers Struggle More – and That’s Okay

There is something worth saying here that doesn’t get said enough.

People who ask a lot of questions – of themselves and of the world – tend to have a harder time. Not because life is crueler to them, but because they feel it more fully. They sit with the uncertainty longer. They resist easy answers. They replay things. They wonder.

This can be exhausting. It can be isolating. It can make ordinary moments feel unbearably heavy sometimes.

But it is also, I think, where most of the real living happens.

The willingness to stay in the question – to resist the comfort of a tidy answer – is its own kind of courage. And it tends to produce people who are more honest, more empathetic, and more genuinely useful to the world than those who settled for the first explanation they found.

Where I Land, for Now

Years later, I come back to the same point I started from.

I want to understand the world  – to see new corners of it, to encounter ideas that challenge and expand how I think, to keep moving forward in a way that is curious rather than comfortable.