Becoming

So we hand them another big box of nothing—the big box of possibility! Your future is limitless! You can do anything you set your mind to! The journey is the destination! Take risks! Be audacious! Dream big! But this mantra doesn’t help them, either. If you don’t know what your life is for, how does it help to be told that your future is limitless?

It might be that our desires change or that our circumstances just don’t line up with an old vision. Either way, many people told me that discarding the picture they had of how their lives would be—sometimes joyfully, sometimes through grieving—was necessary in order to fully embrace something better, or at least accept something different.

“When I look back at those days and the formative elements of who we were in our communities, I see parents who gave generously of their time, energy, effort, and intellectual capacity. That led me to always think about striving for excellence.”

We bring alive a vision by taking that crucial first step toward making it real—sometimes out of inspiration, sometimes out of outrage, sometimes faltering, and sometimes with resolve. To step forward toward a life of caring and engagement, we challenge our conditioning: the fear, the believing of ourselves or others unworthy, the incorporating of