Years ago, I sat in the backyard of my home in Hermosa Beach with my eyes closed, imagining the man I wanted to become.
I'd been practicing visualization for years.
Affirmations, journaling, positive thinking.
The whole arsenal of tools intended to help manifest the life of your dreams.
I was pretty good at imagining things.
Actually bringing them into existence was occasionally another matter.
But this particular visualization stayed with me.
I saw a man walking along a beautiful mountain trail toward a pristine alpine lake.
He was older than I was at the time. Strong. Healthy.
He was wearing a flannel shirt.
There was something about his presence that struck me.
He was peaceful.
He wore a quiet, unrushed smile.
Not the triumphant grin of someone who had conquered the world.
Just the subtle expression of a man thoroughly enjoying the experience in front of him.
He wasn't in a hurry.
He wasn't distracted.
He wasn't trying to get anywhere other than where he was going.
He was simply walking.
And somehow, I knew that man had figured something out.
I wanted to be him.
At the time, I had no idea I'd eventually leave California and move to Oregon.
I didn't know that mountains, forests, and alpine lakes would become part of my surrounding geography.
And I certainly didn't know what the years between that afternoon and this morning would have in store for me.
Had someone shown me the itinerary, I might have asked for a refund.
There would be extraordinary love.
A marriage.
Professional successes and failures.
Financial mistakes.
Decisions made with breathtaking confidence and remarkably little supporting evidence.
And eventually, a collapse so profound that it would strip away nearly everything I believed about myself.
I had always considered myself a good man.
Generous.
Loving.
Well-intentioned.
Someone who cared deeply and wanted to do the right thing.
But when the life I'd built began coming apart, I was forced to confront a difficult truth.
Being a good man and knowing how to build a good life are not the same thing.
I'd confused devotion with surrendering my independence.
Generosity with self-sacrifice.
Optimism with planning.
I'd believed that wanting something badly enough, believing in it deeply enough, and throwing sufficient positive energy in its direction would somehow bring it into existence.
Sometimes it even worked.
Which may have been the worst part.
Because occasional success is a remarkably effective way to reinforce a fundamentally flawed operating system.
But eventually, reality came to collect.
And the bill was enormous.
Here's something I've come to understand about the practice of visualization.
We imagine the outcome.
Rarely do we imagine the becoming.
We see ourselves successful, healthy, loved, confident, at peace.
We imagine the finished product, beautifully illuminated, perhaps with an appropriately inspirational soundtrack.
What we don't imagine is the cost.
The relationships that won't survive.
The beliefs we'll have to abandon.
The uncomfortable truths we'll have to acknowledge about ourselves.
The moments when life hands us evidence that the person we believe ourselves to be and the person our decisions have revealed are not quite the same man.
And here's the part no visualization exercise ever prepared me for.
Sometimes becoming the man you want to be requires admitting that the man you've been is the one standing in your way.
That's a difficult realization.
Particularly when you've spent years believing your heart was in the right place.
Mine usually was.
But a good heart is not a substitute for good judgment.
And life has a way of eventually making that distinction impossible to ignore.
I've thought a great deal about whether I would change anything if I had my life to live over again.
And my answer, surprisingly, is no.
Not because every mistake was necessary.
There were undoubtedly less painful ways to learn some of these lessons.
And certainly not because suffering is inherently noble.
It isn't.
Suffering can just as easily make us bitter, frightened, and smaller.
What matters is what we do with it.
When my life came apart, I had a choice.
I could spend the years that followed constructing explanations that protected my ego.
I could spent my time assigning blame and mourning the life I believed I deserved.
Or I could examine my own role in what had happened.
Not casually.
Not selectively.
But with the kind of honesty that leaves you nowhere to hide.
I had to look at the decisions I'd made, the responsibilities I'd avoided, the patterns I'd repeated, and the ways I'd mistaken good intentions for good conduct.
It wasn't pleasant.
There were days when I barely recognized the man looking back at me.
But somewhere in that process, something began to change.
I stopped trying to reconcile my circumstances with the man I believed I was.
And started allowing my circumstances to teach me who I needed to become.
The experiences didn't make me wiser.
My willingness to be changed by them did.
I'm fifty-one now.
I live in Oregon.
I spend a great deal of time in the mountains, and I've built a body I barely recognize as my own - a body that closely resembles the one I imagined all those years ago.
I have a motorcycle that takes me into beautiful, remote places.
I work with my hands.
I write.
I train.
I build things.
I'm learning to manage my future with the same seriousness I've historically reserved for imagining how much I might have someday.
Better late than never.
But my life looks a little different from the one I imagined for myself years ago.
In some respects, it's considerably smaller.
In others, immeasurably richer.
There are still problems to solve.
Responsibilities to meet.
Old habits that occasionally come knocking, apparently unaware that they've been evicted.
I haven't figured everything out.
But something fundamental has changed.
I no longer believe that imagining a better future is the same as creating one.
I understand that becoming requires participation.
And sometimes that participation looks nothing like progress.
Sometimes it looks like failure.
Sometimes it looks like losing something you thought you couldn't live without.
Sometimes it looks like sitting alone with the uncomfortable realization that you were wrong.
And sometimes, if you're willing to stay with those moments long enough to learn from them, they become the very experiences that change the course of your life.
Not because the universe was conspiring to teach you a lesson.
But because you finally became willing to learn one.
I still believe in visualization.
I think there's enormous value in imagining the person you want to become.
In giving shape to an aspiration before you know how to achieve it.
But I understand the practice differently now.
A vision isn't a promise.
It's a compass.
It can show you a direction.
It cannot walk the road for you.
And it certainly cannot tell you what you'll encounter along the way.
Years ago, sitting in that backyard in Hermosa Beach, I saw a man who was strong, peaceful, and entirely comfortable in his own company.
I had no idea what it would cost to become him.
I didn't know the things I'd lose, the mistakes I'd make, or the uncomfortable truths I'd have to confront.
I thought perhaps I could imagine him into existence.
I couldn't.
Life would have to happen.
And I would have to decide, again and again, what kind of man I intended to be in response.
These days, when I'm out in the Oregon mountains, I sometimes find myself walking along a trail, surrounded by the kind of beauty I once could only imagine.
And every so often, I notice that I'm not thinking about tomorrow.
I'm not regretting yesterday.
I'm not wishing I were somewhere else.
I'm simply enjoying the walk.
And I catch myself smiling.
Not a big smile.
Just a quiet, unrushed smile.
It took me years to recognize him.
And considerably more than I ever imagined it would cost.
But there he is.
The man at the mountain lake.
