Why?

I still remember the conversation so clearly, one of those moments that changes your life but you do not realize it at the time.

I was in my mid-50s, my daughter out of high school, having a conversation with a co-worker on an ordinary morning. I told them, plainly, that I couldn’t do “it” anymore. The “It”? just going to work, coming home, going to work again and going home again. Not burned out, but just going through the motions. Working. Going home. What was the point of it all?

They didn’t offer advice. They asked me a question instead.

“What’s your why? Why do you get up and go to work every day?”

They meant it in a not “because of the paycheck” kind of way. It was intended as a deeper question.

I didn’t have an answer. Fifty-some years old, and I did not have an answer.

That’s the part that still catches me when I tell this story. It wasn’t that I felt stuck. But, that one simple question broke open a gap that five decades of following the rules had somehow never revealed. I had built a whole life around doing the right next thing: the job, the schedule, the responsibilities I could check off. Nobody had ever asked me what any of it was for.

That question sat with me longer than I expected to. It didn’t resolve. But yet, there was something humming beneath the surface I could not quite put my finger on.

Looking back now, I recognize that hum. It was the same one I’d felt as a kid, drawn to an I-Ching book or a Ouija board with no framework for why any of it interested me. The one who’s favorite book in 4rth grade, A Wrinkle in Time, spoke deeply to me without me knowing why. The questions I asked myself about death and what was beyond the physical while I struggled through Catholic school.

The same hum underneath years of doing what was expected instead of what I sensed, intuited. I’d had the whispers young. I’d lost the thread. And here it was again, decades later, looking like a normal Tuesday conversation in the office.

I didn’t quit my jo. I didn’t have a plan. What I did was smaller, and it turns out, more important: I started meditating. Ten minutes some mornings. A guided app on my phone. The old Oprah/Deepak Guided Meditation challenges with journaling. Nothing dramatic enough to tell anyone about at the time.

But something in me had been given permission to listen. And once I started listening, I couldn’t stop.

I want to stop here, because it would be easy to tell the story as if the question fixed something. It didn’t. “What’s your why” wasn’t the answer.

It was, as Leonard Cohen would say, the crack where the light comes in.

The real work of walking through it took years, and layers I couldn’t see yet that day. The meditation was a door. It wasn’t the room on the other side of it. I know now that waking up spiritually and actually changing are two different things. I’d need to find that out the harder way, later, through work I didn’t know existed yet. But that’s a scene for another week.

Every labyrinth starts with a single turn. You don’t see the center from the entrance. You just take the step in front of you, and then the one after that, trusting that the path , even when it doubles back on you, is still moving you somewhere.

Mine started with a question I couldn’t answer, at a desk, on an otherwise unremarkable day.

If you’re waiting for something more dramatic, realize this. It

doesn’t have to look like anything. Mine didn’t. The small steps matter.

What’s your why? And what would it take for you to actually sit with not knowing, instead of rushing past it to an answer that isn’t true yet?