Chapter 16: Awakening
This is still a strange part of my life to discuss because I don’t fully understand it myself.
I can only explain it as I experienced it.
For some time, something had been changing in the way I looked at my life and the world around me.
Eventually, it began to feel like a complete shift in consciousness.
Like waking from a dream.
Things I had once accepted without much thought suddenly seemed hollow to me.
I began looking at the people around me and wondering how much of our lives were spent isolated inside our
own little worlds.
What had happened to our sense of community?
Why did we seem so indifferent to one another?
Why shouldn’t the people around us matter—the neighbors we live beside, the people we see at local stores,
the strangers we encounter throughout an ordinary day?
I also began questioning my relationship with material things and entertainment.
How much of my life had been spent consuming?
Buying things.
Watching things.
Wanting things.
And how much of it had actually made my life better?
These questions began changing the way I lived.
I found myself questioning systems and institutions I had previously taken for granted as well—politics,
healthcare, food, social media, and the broader culture surrounding me.
I didn’t suddenly have answers to any of these things.
If anything, I had more questions.
But one question kept returning:
Why?
Why was I spending my limited time and energy on the things I was spending them on?
What actually mattered to me?
My children mattered.
My wife mattered.
My family mattered.
The way I treated other people mattered.
The person I was becoming mattered.
Much of what had once occupied my attention suddenly didn’t seem nearly as important.
At the time, I described what was happening to me as an awakening.
I decided I no longer wanted to pretend everything was okay simply to avoid conflict.
I wanted to speak openly about what I believed, even if doing so sometimes affected my relationships.
I wanted to stop shaping myself around the fear that someone might reject me for saying what I thought.
But there was another lesson I still needed to learn.
Speaking what I believed to be true did not automatically make me right.
And letting go of my ego did not mean I had somehow escaped it.
If anything, the previous months had shown me how easily certainty itself could become another form of
ego.
I was still angry.
I was still judgmental.
I was still learning.
Whatever this awakening was, it wasn’t an endpoint.
It was the beginning of another period of questioning who I was and what kind of person I wanted to
become.