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.
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.
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