Have you ever felt lost?
I can’t tell you how often I have felt lost, so many times in my life going all the way back to high school. It has been kind of that word that keeps repeating at different seasons of my life.
Lost on what is the right next step after high school.
Lost on what is the right next step after the Marine Corps.
Lost on how to be the best husband I can be.
Lost on understanding how to live a full life as a father.
Lost on what to do after dropping out of college.
Lost on what to do when you lose your job.
That feeling of lost is a powerful one because I would describe it as a top level word, it doesn’t go down to the roots of the matter. It just keeps us in the feeling of not knowing what direction to go in.
Most men in today’s society I feel have a sense of being lost, but are not doing the work to dig deeper and understand what is truly at the core of the feeling.
In each of the scenarios above I had to step outside of the word lost and really dig into the feeling that I was feeling in those moments. Get that metaphorical shovel out and break a sweat.
The part that isn’t talked about much among men is how we must feel the unfelt, acknowledge its existent, understand where it comes from and take steps to move through the feeling.
What I can say I learned and had validated after each time I felt lost was that I was ignoring a core feeling, a core belief, a core truth about my life that how I saw the world needed to change.
I had to realize that what got me here in life won’t get me there. Meaning the life, I have lived up to this point is something that won’t deliver the life I crave to live. I always need to be growing.
It means that I must continue to cultivate and enrichen my life with what author of “Becoming a King” Morgan Synder calls good soil.
The feeling of lost or losing your way is really a feeling of living out of alignment of your life and what you know to be what you are meant to be in this life vs where you currently are living.
Morgan talks about how the fruits of our life don’t come from focusing on the trees you planted, but the soil in which they grow. Most men focus on the seed and the tree, but the true quality of the fruit is determined by the nutrients and soil the seed is planted in.
When I have lost my way, what was really going on was that I needed to get back to my soil, I had in those moments chased the wrong things.
I had to realize that to have good soil men need to have adventure in our lives, we need quality men who ask how to live life at a higher level, we need to lead our kingdom as he says. He considers your kingdom that small area of influence you lead in your life, from yourself, to your family, to your relationships.
If you know my story you know that when I turned thirty, I was in the pit of life at that time and about as lost as I had felt in my life. I had a deep fear of dyeing alone and not having my life matter. This feeling of lost when I excavated to the roots was related to having no friends in my life.
It is this turning where I began to start talking to dads at the park and building key friendships to gain direction in my life, gain access to paths to walk that I had not realized even existed.
One particular gift that I didn’t realize I needed from having friends in my life was that they helped reflect back the value in who I am that I wasn’t able to see.
They helped reflect that despite never being a hugger throughout all my life, that I actually give really good hugs. It took a small group of men to help reflect back that value and for me to step into it and fully own it.
Often men feel lost because we don’t have the very basic reflection of close friends to real help reveal who we are.
I get asked the question a lot talking to dads, I feel like I don’t know who I am. This is code for, I feel lost and after we dig deep into this topic, they realize the value of their life was always there, they just needed a mirror to see it clearly and understand how they can cultivate their own soil using this new found value.
