I have always felt one of my gifts is an innate knowing that I am meant to feel good. In the layered experiences that make up a life, this ideal has been shuffled in the pile, up and down, depending on the circumstances, always somewhere in the mess to be retrieved and put back on top. The ironic nature of life imbued me with tangible access to this truism, but simultaneously the contrast to it created feelings of pain and lack so acute that I felt I had no other choice but to search, seek, study, and process everything pulling me away from the inner knowing that things could feel better.

What an important, personal, layered question. If we are striving to feel better, more ourselves, it's a question that is worth asking. It helps to bring clarity and truth to the murkiness of leaving things behind, and an impetus to move forward day by day. I’ve always felt this process starts-and it's quite possibly the biggest step, one that is often repeated—with admitting, bringing consciousness to a desire to have things be different in some way. We go along being who we are, living as we do, experiencing what shows up, and at some point, it dawns on us, that something, or many things are out of alignment—“problems”. Some people seem to accept ‘that's just how things are…’,’ it's just how I am…’, and carry on, living in the usual way at various levels of resolve, ranging from dutiful, to apathetic, self-destructive, or socially destructive.

During the progression of my life, when I get down to it, deep in the nitty-gritty, while screaming inside, ‘what is it you want!’ The answer at the bottom of the well is always freedom. That’s it. That’s what I want. Money, time, and travel are all symbols of it for me, and chasing after these things has kept me scrambling for decades.