What Makes a Life Meaningful?

Welcome to The Seeker with Brad Wetzler.

Over the past few years, this newsletter has followed the path my life has taken. I’ve written about memoir and writing, but also about travel, relationships, healing, spirituality, science, and the surprising ways those subjects overlap. Looking back, I can see they were never separate conversations. They’ve always been different ways of exploring the same question: How do we live a deeper, more meaningful life?

You’ll still find the essays I’ve always loved writing, but they’ll now be joined by a podcast featuring conversations with writers, psychologists, scientists, adventurers, contemplatives, and other thoughtful people whose lives and work have expanded my own. I’ll also share shorter field notes from the road, from the mountains and desert or jungle I’m traveling through, from books I’m reading, and from ordinary moments, too. Because a memoirist knows that ordinary moments contain as much or more juice than the extraordinary times. If there is a common thread running through all of this, it's curiosity. I don't have a grand theory of how to live, and I'm not interested in pretending that I do. I'm not even convinced there is one waiting to be discovered. The more we learn about the universe, the more the mystery seems to deepen. What I care about is paying close attention to this strange, beautiful, heartbreaking experience of being human—and inviting you into the conversation. It felt right to begin this new chapter with a personal essay about the path that brought me here. I hope, as you read it, you’ll find yourself reflecting not only on my journey, but on your own.

Welcome to The Seeker. I’m glad you’re here.

This morning I came home soaked from a sunrise hike in the foothills above Boulder. It had rained through the night, and instead of wishing for blue skies, I found myself grateful for the gray. After years of drought, rain feels almost miraculous here. The trails smelled like wet pine trees, and little streams that had been bone dry only weeks before crossed the path again. By the time Tommy and I reached home, he was breathing hard from the climb—and I was ready for more coffee.

I poured a cup and stepped onto the patio. Tommy settled onto the cool flagstones while I opened my notebook. Off to the west, the ridgelines disappeared into whiskey-colored clouds. It struck me how fortunate I’ve been to have spent so much time in beautiful places: 19 years in New Mexico’s high desert, 13 years here in Boulder, and months and months of travel to jungles, beaches, rivers, monasteries in the desert, and, of course, my share of airports. I’ve spent my life trying to make sense of wherever I had just been and wondering, often without admitting it to myself, where the hell this journey was leading.

A few weeks earlier, I had returned from Costa Rica, where I had gone to belatedly celebrate my sixtieth birthday. The trip had come together almost accidentally after a friend invited me to spend a week at her retreat center, Ascension, formerly Sunrise Sanctuary, tucked into the jungle above the small village of Montezuma on the Nicoya Peninsula. For years, Sunrise Sanctuary has hosted yoga retreats, healing workshops, and contemplative gatherings. Today, under the name Ascension, it is focusing even more on personal transformation. (For more information about Ascension, click here. Yes, this retreat center is as stunning as the imagery.)

We wandered jungle trails and empty beaches, swam beneath waterfalls that emptied into freshwater pools only yards from the Pacific. The cool mountain water poured over my shoulders while waves crashed against volcanic rock. We lingered over long dinners at little restaurants beside the sea. I climbed aboard tiny puddle-jumper planes that skimmed low above a coastline dividing rainforest and surf. Somewhere during that week I realized I was actually living beautifully. Some birthdays ask for a party. Others ask us simply to live.

I wonder if you’ve ever had a week like that. A few ordinary days that, for reasons you couldn’t explain at the time, quietly divided your life into before and after.

As I sat there that rainy morning, I found myself tracing the arc of the previous three decades. For the first half of those years, I was living the life I had imagined as a young journalist. I wrote for Outside, National Geographic Adventure, Wired, GQ, Men’s Journal, Travel + Leisure, and other magazines that sent me to Greenland, the Amazon, Indonesia, the Arctic, Mexcio’s Sierra Madre and the Yucatan, Israel and Palestine, India, the Caribbean, and dozens of other places that had once existed only on the pull-down maps hanging at the front of my childhood classrooms. I was

chasing extraordinary stories in extraordinary places. Looking back, I can see that those years were carrying me farther and farther from myself. Maybe I had to travel that far before I could begin the journey home.

It’s tempting, when looking back over a life, to divide it neatly into chapters. The years of adventure. The years of healing. The years of seeking. But our lives rarely unfold that way. The seeds of what comes later are almost always buried in what came before, and what looked like an outward journey has turned out to have been an inward one all along. I couldn’t see that when I was thirty. I can see it now.

It all began in 2012, when, on a lark, I traveled to Israel to hike the Jesus Trail, a pilgrimage stretching from Nazareth to Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee. I told my editors I wanted to explore the landscapes of Jesus and revisit the faith of my Christian childhood. That explanation was true, but only on the surface. Somewhere between Nazareth and the hills overlooking the Sea of Galilee, the assignment changed. I remember walking alone beneath a hard blue sky, the trail winding downhill past caves where robbers and stray would-be messiahs hid out during Jesus’ time, when it occurred to me that I had stopped asking questions about Jesus and had begun asking questions about life. Nothing dramatic happened that afternoon. There was no revelation waiting around the next bend. Only the slow realization that I had spent years traveling the world while carrying the most challenging terrain—the mind and the heart—with me everywhere I went.

I only knew that the story I thought I had gone to write had slipped quietly out of my hands. The pilgrimage was no longer about Christianity. It had become an invitation to begin examining the landscape within with the same curiosity I had always reserved for distant countries.

Looking back now, I think that was the beginning of everything that has followed. The journeys continued. India called me back again and again. I wandered the Rocky Mountains and the deserts of the Southwest with no assignment except to pay attention. I immersed myself in memoir, psychology, contemplative traditions, and the long work of healing. I fell in love, lost love, misunderstood love, rebuilt my relationship with my father, and discovered that the deepest adventures of my life would never appear on a map.

Somewhere during those years, almost without noticing, I stopped searching for the place that would finally change me. Paying attention had become enough.

As I sat on the patio that morning, watching the rain move across the foothills, I realized that sixty hadn’t given me the clarity I imagined when I was younger. If anything, the questions had become larger, more nuanced, and far more interesting. The difference was that I no longer felt driven to answer them once and for all. I had begun to trust that a life isn’t measured by how quickly we solve its mysteries, but by how fully we’re willing to inhabit them.

Looking back, I can see that every journey had offered something I needed. Greenland taught me about endurance. Israel taught me that the most difficult pilgrimage would unfold inside my own heart. India taught me to sit still long enough to hear what had been drowned out by ambition. The women I have loved taught me that intimacy is one of the fiercest teachers we’ll ever encounter. My father taught me that reconciliation is possible long after we have decided it isn’t. Costa Rica reminded me that every so often life asks us to pause, look behind us with gratitude, and then turn toward whatever is calling next.

Those places and people didn’t answer the questions that have followed me through life. They refined them. They taught me to ask better ones.

I suspect that’s true for many of us. We spend years believing that meaning is hidden somewhere beyond the next horizon, only to discover that the real work begins when we finally become curious about the life we’ve already been given. We begin paying closer attention to the ordinary moments we once rushed past: the morning walk, the difficult conversation, the grief that softens over time, the

unexpected forgiveness, the sentence in a book that stays with us for years, the quiet certainty that we’re changing even when we can’t yet explain how.

Maybe that’s what seeking really is. Not chasing extraordinary experiences, but discovering that ordinary life is far stranger, more beautiful, and more alive than we ever imagined.

Those are the questions I hope to keep following here.

Tomorrow morning I’ll probably lace up my boots, clip Tommy’s leash onto his collar, and head back into the foothills. If it rains again, I’ll welcome it. I’ll come home, make another cup of coffee, open my notebook, and continue following the questions that have quietly shaped my life for more than three decades.

Because the older I get, the less I believe we’re moving through an indifferent world. I think we’re moving through one that is endlessly speaking to us: through mountains and dreams, through grief and love, through the people who

stay, the people who leave, and through the astonishing fact that we are here at all, conscious for this brief moment, able to wonder what any of it means. We don’t have to solve the mystery. We only have to become intimate enough with our own lives to notice that we are living inside one.

If you’re asking some of those same questions, I’d be honored to have you walk alongside me for a while.

If you haven’t bought my memoir, Into the Soul of the World: My Journey to Healing, yet, I hope you will.

Here’s what author Hampton Sides wrote about it:

“Brad Wetzler has led the very definition of an adventurous life, but in Into the Soul of the World, he gives an unflinching account of his interior adventures. Wetzler’s soulful quest, by turns anguished and transcendent, will resonate with readers around the world who struggle to find purpose and a sense of the holy in the ambient jitter of the digital age.”