Be There for Your Own Becoming

 

Photo by Ashim D’Silva on Unsplash

A few months ago, I found myself standing at the edge of something . It wasn’t a cliff or a grand revelation, just a subtle shift I didn’t have words for yet. It started early on October 30, 2024, when I sent a text to my two business partners letting them know I was leaving the company we’d built together.

I knew it was time for me to move on, but I didn’t know what came next.

A few months later, I was deep in the limbo of job transition, writing small essays every morning just to clear my head. No grand plan. No series in mind. Just one thought at a time, trying to stay honest.

Those early pieces, though. They started tugging at a thread I hadn’t thought about or touched in years.

That was just over 60 days ago.

In that time, I’ve written more than I have in years. Wrapped up my transition from the company I helped build. Started two new companies. Taken on a major software project for my old partners. Built and pitched tools for new clients. Helped former coworkers. Laughed harder with my kids. Spent more meaningful time with my wife. Run longer distances — on purpose.

I’ve been busier than ever.

And yet, somehow, time has slowed down.

Not because my schedule got easier. It didn’t. What changed is that I stopped disappearing into it.

Before, I was always in motion; always racing from one deadline to the next, managing things, fixing things, and carrying the weight. I knew how to be responsible. How to push through. How to keep everything upright, even when I felt like I was collapsing inside. I called it “being the provider.” I called it “doing what needed to be done.” I told myself I’d make time for peace after everything was handled.

But “everything” is never handled.

I thought I was sprinting toward stability, but I was really just sprinting. Hoping I’d eventually arrive at a life I already had, but didn’t know how to live in.

What’s changed isn’t that I finally reached the summit. What’s changed is that I looked up from the trail and realized I’d been running with my eyes down for years.

Presence is different than pursuit. Presence says: you’re allowed to live your life now. Not later. Not when it’s easier. Not when you’ve earned it.

Just now.

In October 2024, I made a decision after a hard conversation with one of my partners. We’d worked together for a third of my life. I knew things would change after that, but it didn’t feel dramatic. There was no lightning strike of epiphany. I just started paying closer attention. I stayed with a few hard truths instead of turning away. I stopped trying to outrun the dissatisfaction and started asking where it came from.

I wrote it down.

I didn’t flinch.

And something shifted.

I’ve started running again. Not out of stress or obligation, but because I like how it feels to move under my own power. I’m remembering conversations with my kids. I’m laughing more with my wife. I’m noticing how often I used to fill space with noise just to avoid stillness.

I’m not becoming someone new. I’m just becoming more of who I already was, beneath the pressure and the pace.

That’s what this past stretch has been: not a reinvention, but a return. A return to presence. To the moments I used to rush past because they didn’t feel productive. To the version of me who didn’t need to be perfect or impressive.

There are paths everywhere. Some you follow. Some you make. But none of them lead you to some final version of yourself. They just strip away the noise until what’s left is something honest, something you were always carrying.

I didn’t need a guru or a mountaintop. I just needed to stop ghosting myself. To stop managing my life like a project or problem to solve. To start living in it again.

And that’s what I’ve been doing.

Writing. Building. Parenting. Letting the hard questions sit a little longer. Taking more time to notice the moments I’d been treating like background noise.

Being here.

That’s the real shift. Not the companies. Not the book. Not the job I left behind.

Just this: I’m here.

And that is enough.

Thanks for reading, and before you go. . .

I’m Aaron Pace. I write from the middle of things — life, business, fatherhood, faith, and the slow work of becoming someone I can live with. Not as an expert, but as someone trying to pay attention.

If this piece resonated with you, I’d be honored if you followed along here on Medium. I write — not because I’ve arrived, but because I’m finally moving again.

You can read the entire 30 Days In the Canyon series here.

You can buy my book here.

Not Every Step Has a Story

 

Photo by Wayne M. on Unsplash

We were headed to Aurora, Utah to see my wife’s paternal grandparents. Fourth of July weekend. The kind of trip you imagine will be uneventful — until it isn’t.

I watched in the rearview mirror as the accident I saw coming unfolded in slow motion. I’d just slammed on the brakes to avoid hitting the car in front of me — who had failed to stop before hitting the car in front of them. Then, behind us, smoke rose from the tires of a car traveling way too fast. They swerved into the lane where we were, hit the car behind us, propelling us forward into the mess ahead.

Five cars. Center lane. Rush hour. The entire freeway shut down for almost three hours.

Our car had only 600 miles on it. We bought it as a gift for my wife after she finished pharmacy school with top honors. It was honestly one of those purchases you make when you’re young, proud, and think, “This is how you begin a good life.”

My wife was pregnant with our first child.

Our car looked totaled. The car behind us had been forced underneath our car — both our back tires were off the ground. The hood of our car was slightly damaged, but we didn’t hit the accident in front of us with enough force for the air bags to deploy. But our insurance company wouldn’t total the car. Ironically, it was too new. Too much potential value still left in it. So they spent the $18,000 to repair a $26,000 car.

We kept that car for nearly 17 more years.

The irony doesn’t end with the insurance logic. The real irony is that the parts of the car that bore no visible scars from that five-car pileup — the steering wheel, the seats, and the floor mats — those wore out from something else entirely: daily life.

There were places on the wheel where my thumbs had smoothed down the material from countless commutes, road trips, grocery runs, and late-night drives to get home and sleep in my own bed. That wear didn’t come from the wreck. It came from all the years after it.

As our family grew, that car became my everything vehicle. It’s funny when thoughts of that car float into my head. When nothing big is happening. When I’m folding laundry or sitting in traffic. When the kids are fine, work is busy-but-normal, and I can’t point to a single thing that would make a good story at a dinner party.

There’s a kind of fatigue that creeps in during those stretches. A low-grade frustration that maybe you’re not doing enough. Not being enough. Not becoming enough. Or worse — that what you’re doing doesn’t mean anything. That it lacks substance.

And that tension between the dramatic and the mundane is one I’ve never really known how to resolve. For most of my life, I believed you proved your worth in the big moments. The crash. The diagnosis. The deadline. The rescue.

But now, in the middle stretch of life, I’m starting to wonder if maybe we become who we are somewhere else entirely.

In 2017, I took a group of teenage boys, including my son, on a grueling multi-day hike to the summit of Kings Peak. The trip was long, chaotic, and physically draining. We had diabetics on the trail. Kids crying. Misjudged distances. Nearly fell off a cliff coming down the wrong side of a boulder field.

I prayed hard on that mountain. I also yelled. I made poor decisions and had to apologize. I tried to carry too much. I tried to be the strong one. I watched my son stay calm when I wasn’t. I watched him ask to pray when I didn’t think to. That hike should’ve been one of those capital-M moments — the kind you frame in your personal Rolodex of dinner party stories. And in some ways, it was.

But when I think about it now, what I remember most clearly isn’t the summit. It’s the feeling of my pack digging into my shoulders at mile three. The serene feeling as I watched the morning light glisten on Dollar Lake. The sound of kids playing cards while chipmunks waited for us to leave. The ache in my feet from twenty thousand regular steps. Not heroic. Not cinematic. Just real.

And maybe that’s the point.

The things that shape us aren’t always the crashes. They’re the commutes. The laundry. The thumb-worn steering wheel that says: you kept going.

I’ve spent so much of my life trying to matter. Trying to lead, to protect, to provide. Trying to be impressive, useful, remembered. As a man, there’s this deep current that tells you your worth is tied to the moments people will talk about when you’re gone. The time you saved the day. The time you held the line. The time you sacrificed everything.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

But no one tells you how much strength it takes to just keep showing up.

To drive the same car for 18 years.
To fold the shirt your son will wear to school tomorrow.
To go to work again, even when you’d rather build something else.
To change the tire at 10,000 feet with the kit your wife thoughtfully put in the trunk the day before.

I don’t remember what I was wearing the day we bought that car. But I remember what my wife wore on our first date. I remember what I was doing when we got the cancer diagnosis. I remember the big things.

What I’m learning is that those big things don’t hold me up. The little ones do. The invisible, boring, quiet, faithful ones. The ones nobody says thank you for.

There’s a grace in that. And a kind of quiet mercy.

You don’t have to live every day like it’s a story worth telling. You just have to live it.

And that is enough.

When Progress Doesn't Feel Like Progress

 

Photo by Zack Silver on Unsplash

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path. — Joseph Campbell

There’s a stretch of road near my house, less than a mile from my front door, that I run almost every morning. The incline is gentle, barely noticeable by car, but when you’re running before sunrise with a headlamp strapped to your forehead, and it’s the warm-up mile, you feel every inch of it.

At the top of the rise, there’s a stop sign. Simple. Predictable. Same shape, same spot, same bright reflective surface staring back at me like a clock that forgot how to tick.

Some mornings, though, it messes with me. I’ll be halfway up the hill and swear the stop sign is moving away from me. Like some suburban mirage, it floats just out of reach. I can see it clearly. I know I’m moving. But it feels like I’m getting nowhere.

That’s the kind of feeling I’ve been sitting with lately — not about running, but about life.

I’m a creature of habit. I wake up, eat the same G2G Bar, scroll social media longer than I should, and tie my shoes before heading out the door. The routine is familiar. Grounding, even. But sometimes I wonder if I’ve mistaken repetition for direction. Again, it’s not about the running. Maybe sometimes about the running.

There’s a belief I absorbed somewhere along the way — maybe from childhood, maybe from culture, maybe from watching men I admired — that progress should be measurable. That if you’re not moving up, earning more, and achieving faster, you’re falling behind. That a good man makes things happen. That a good provider doesn’t waste time on detours.

And yet, if I’m honest, some of the most meaningful parts of my life have looked suspiciously or obviously like detours.

The jobs I hated taught me more about what I care about than the ones I loved. The business relationships that failed left room for the ones that matter. The running injury that sidelined me for months? It’s probably the only reason I started listening to my body instead of treating it like a machine on deadline.

None of that looked like progress at the time.

There’s a kind of emotional vertigo that comes with striving — when you’re doing everything you can to move forward but nothing seems to budge. It’s a special kind of madness, watching a stop sign you know is fixed appear to float away from you.

And yet… I’m still running. I’m still moving.

When I first started writing this, I wondered if that stop sign was a bad metaphor. But the more I think about it, the more I think it works. Life rarely gives us a straight path or clear signage. Even when we can see the goal, progress doesn’t always feel linear. It’s subtle. Uneven. More like cairns on a trail — those small stacks of stones that guide hikers through the backcountry. Sometimes easy to miss. Sometimes easy to doubt. But they’re there.

That’s what it feels like to parent teenagers and young adults, by the way. Like following a trail marked only by cairns that may or may not still be standing when you need them. Or worse, cairns that were put there by someone trying to steer you wrong.

My twelfth grade English teacher, Aunt Nancy, tried to convince me that Joseph Campbell was one of the greatest philosophers of our time. I didn’t buy it or appreciate it at the time. The first time I heard that quote about the path, it barely registered. I forgot about it for three decades.

Now? I see it everywhere.

We keep expecting clarity as proof that we’re on the right track. But clarity often comes after the choice. After the missteps. After the hard work. Progress isn’t a pre-lit walkway. It’s a mess of trial and error.

And that’s where I find myself these days. I’m not lost, exactly, but not entirely confident in the direction either.

If any of this resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

Sometimes I wish progress came with flashing neon signs pointing toward the next step. That it would show up with fanfare or at least a push notification:

“Hey, good job holding your tongue in that argument.”
“Nice work choosing rest instead of numbing out.”
“Way to not quit, even though the metrics didn’t move this week.”

But it doesn’t. It’s quiet. It looks like laundry folded. Lawn mowed. Email sent. Kid hugged. Resentment set aside. It’s the kind of progress that doesn’t go on resumes and doesn’t impress anyone at a dinner party, but it still counts.

Even the side quests count.

Especially the side quests.

The detours of our lives are almost never distractions from our main story. They’re the way we become the kind of person who can finish the story at all.

These days, when I hit that stretch of road in the dark, I try not to stare down the stop sign. I focus on the rhythm of my steps. The breath in. The breath out. The fact that I showed up. That I’m still moving.

And every once in a while, the stop sign doesn’t feel far away. It just feels like part of the route. Nothing mystical. Just a marker.

And that is enough.

You Don’t Live There Anymore

 

Photo by Nikola on Unsplash

This article is part of a two-part series though each stands well enough on its own. If you’d like to read the first article, you can find it here.

The first significant injury I remember happened when I was eight years old.

My twin cousins were visiting from Arizona, and we were running around my grandparents’ backyard. They had a small treehouse built into the plum tree that leaned slightly toward the southern fence line. My cousins climbed up ahead of me. I scrambled up the ladder, eager not to miss out on whatever mischief they were about to get into, and caught my hand in the hinge side of the door just as my cousin wrenched it shut.

Specifically, my right index finger landed between the frame and the hinge. The door didn’t close all the way… because of the bone.

I screamed, which made my cousin let go of the handle. When I pulled my hand back, it didn’t bleed right away, but I thought I could see bone. My misshapen finger started swelling immediately. I don’t remember the car ride to the clinic; just holding a paper towel around my hand and feeling every heartbeat. Then sitting motionless in a vinyl chair, waiting.

They sent us to a different clinic. Then we waited again. Hours passed. My dad sat beside me. The initial shock had worn off, and the pain wasn’t as intense anymore. My grandpa was there too, pacing the length of the room just to stay moving.

The first doctor x-rayed my finger. It was cracked down the length, and both he and the second doctor figured surgery would be required.

A specialist was called in. When he finally arrived, well past midnight, he unwrapped my hand, removed what was left of the fingernail, and told us surgery wouldn’t be necessary.

I would heal.

Not that I wanted surgery, but it felt anticlimactic after all the waiting. I’d expected something more dramatic.

And I did heal.

But the real wound didn’t go away so easily. Not because it was serious. But because I didn’t want it to.

I blamed my cousin, even though it wasn’t really his fault. I decided I hated him. Not in passing. Not as a tantrum. I made it my mission. I remember lying in bed a few nights later, dreaming up ways to get even. It was the kind of misplaced fury only a child can carry with total conviction and zero self-awareness.

And I held onto it.

For four years.

That grudge lived in me through fifth and sixth grade. It wasn’t until I was nearly twelve that something softened. I don’t remember a specific turning point — just that the hatred didn’t feel so acute anymore. I’d stopped nursing the wound. And when I finally let it go, I realized how absurd it had all been.

A door closed. An accident. A hurt. Then four years of internal, elective scar tissue that had nothing to do with my cousin — and everything to do with the way I handled pain.

We all carry things longer than we should.

I wrote recently about another cousin. Another injury. Different story, same shape. That one involved a rock to the hand, not a door — but the real damage lived in me just as long. It took years to admit how much I let it shape me.

And I think about that now — how many hurts in adulthood follow the same pattern. Someone says something sharp. A mistake cuts deep. We bleed a little. And then we decide, almost imperceptibly, to let the bitterness stay.

Maybe it makes us feel in control. Maybe it helps us feel strong. But it rarely leads us anywhere good.

I’ve carried bigger wounds since then. Real ones. The kind that don’t go away in a month or a year. Emotional betrayals. Professional failures. Seasons of burnout so intense they left my confidence in ruins. Nights when I couldn’t sleep because the what-ifs and why-didn’ts rattled around too loudly to silence. And that’s when I wasn’t intentionally fanning the flames.

Those were the seasons I chose not to let the light in. Not because I liked the dark. But because the dark was familiar. And familiar pain is easy to cling to, sometimes easier than the uncomfortable work of healing.

That’s what I’m noticing now: how easy it is to stay wounded, even after the injury has technically passed. To replay conversations. Keep a scorecard. Rehearse what we wish we’d said. It becomes habit. And then the habit becomes a kind of home.

A sad one. But familiar.

I don’t want to live like that anymore.

There’s a line from a song that comes to mind when I think about all this. The lyric goes: “You don’t live there anymore.”

That phrase has stuck with me. It’s become a quiet check-in. When the rumination starts up, or I find myself picking at an old emotional scab, I ask myself, Do you still live there?

And most of the time, the answer is no.

If anything resonates with you, I wrote a book you might appreciate.

Aaron Pace on Books.by

What if the life you're trying to escape from is the very one you're meant to live? You Don't Have to Escape to Be Free…

books.by

The moment I remembered the treehouse story, I laughed. Not because it didn’t hurt. It did. But because I could see it differently now. I could see myself clearly. Small and scared, doing the best I could to make sense of pain. And choosing what I thought was control when what I really needed was comfort. And forgiveness.

That’s what we do when we’re hurt and no one’s around to help us process it: we make up stories that feel safer than the truth.

I still do that sometimes. I still resist healing because healing requires change. And change requires honesty.

But I’m trying. Slowly. I’m trying to stop writing myself into the same chapter over and over again.

There’s still so much I don’t know.

But I do know this: the old pain doesn’t get to decide who I become next.

The door closed. I screamed. It hurt.

But I don’t live there anymore.

And that is enough.