Last week I wrote that the third and final part of every rite of passage is the return.

 

What I didn’t mention is that it’s the hardest of the three steps.

 

Because it drops you back into the exact life you left. Except you’re now carrying with you the burden of knowing you didn’t have before.

 

Watts, in that lecture I mentioned above, described it back in 1959 in the following way:

 

“[At a certain age], something shifts. And what shifts is this: you begin to see through the game. Not all at once, perhaps. Maybe it starts with small things. You stop caring quite so much about what your neighbors think. You find yourself less interested in impressing people. You notice that the things you once thought were so important, the title on your business card, the car in your driveway, the number in your bank account, start to feel rather hollow.

 

And this is when the fear comes. Because if you are not your achievements, if you are not your possessions, if you are not your role in society, then who are you?

 

This is the question that terrifies people. This is why so many people around this age buy sports cars, or have affairs, or make dramatic changes they later regret. They are running from the question. They are trying very hard not to see what is becoming obvious.

 

But if you do not run, if you sit still and let the question be there, something remarkable happens. You begin to notice that beneath all the roles you have been playing, beneath all the masks you have been wearing, there is something else. Something that was there all along. Something that never changed, even though everything in your life changed.

 

The Buddhists call this your true nature. The Hindus call it atma. I simply call it you. The REAL you.“

 

And then, in the middle of all this, while questioning everything, I got this message on LinkedIn: