Life Is Answering Life's Question: Who Are You?

​I think most days I get out of bed and I am quietly asking life this grand question, "Who are you?"

Lately, though, I've come to realize just how often I do not hear the echo of that question - how often I do not hear life asking me back, "Who are you?"

When I was almost 30 years old, I left Ohio, where I'd grown up and lived all my life, to live on the coast of North Carolina. I didn't know a soul there. I was taking on a job completely out of the realm of any work I'd ever done. Why? To be honest, it felt like I was chasing an answer:

Who are you, life?

Several years later, I got married. Something I'd sworn I'd never do. And really, up until just a few months before that marriage, it was a pledge I was fully committed to keeping. And yet, here was another big shift in life. And to be honest, it felt like I was still chasing an answer:

Who are you, life?

Nearly 8 years later, we had a son. This in spite of us agreeing when we got married that we'd never have kids. I don't know why I - and we - changed our minds. In many ways it felt like we were chasing an answer:

Who are you, life?

Twenty two years after I got married, I left that marriage. Divorce. Certainly something I swore I'd never do. And in many ways, I had reached a point in my life where it felt like life had no answers at all. The chase to find them had been pointless, I was starting to concede. And what is the point of life if there are no answers?

Yesterday, I left a job I'd been at for well over a decade. A job built on the work I started in eastern North Carolina some thirty years before when I left Ohio. For many reasons, this job had been the most meaningful job of my life.

As I walked away, I could feel the thunder of another momentous shift in my life. But I did not ask any questions. I just walked away. In silence. And it was in that silence that I think I heard an echo - life - returning the question I'd asked for nearly six decades.

"Who are you?"

Maybe life isn’t something I am to chase down and figure out. Maybe life has been moving toward me all along, shaping me, waiting for me to become someone who can finally say yes. Maybe I have never been the one chasing at all.

We go through life thinking we are seeking answers from it, and yet, all the while, it is life that is shaping the answers in us.

While we are chasing, life is molding. How different are they, really - the chasing and the molding?

It's true, life continues to confuse me. It can leave me feeling like there are no answers. But I am reminded lately, most certainly and profoundly in this writing, that life is not about finding answers, it is about becoming one.