Meaning in Motion

I’ve been trying to write this essay for a long time. It’s the foundation of a project I’m calling Meaning in Motion.

At the end, I’ve included Field Guide No. 1: Meaning, a practical companion designed to help you put these ideas into practice.

I hope you enjoy it.

-Mike

On the third night alone on a mountain in New Mexico, the storm found me.

I was at 11,500 feet, four days into a wilderness fast with no food, no phone, and nothing to organize the hours around. Earlier that night I had climbed to a peak above camp for an all-night vigil, the kind of thing that sounds poetic until you are actually sitting on a rock in the dark with nothing between you and whatever is out there. The storm came across the ridge fast. The temperature dropped, and the rain turned sideways, and within minutes I was under a sagebrush, soaked through, shaking, watching lightning move across a valley I could not see the bottom of. There was nowhere to go and nothing to decide. For the first time in as long as I could remember, I was not managing the experience, I was just in it. The noise that had been running in my head for three days, the planning and the rehearsing and the quiet panic of having nothing to do, all of it went silent, and what was underneath it was something I had not expected. Not clarity or some profound answer. Just a stillness large enough that the things I had been avoiding could finally surface. I came off that mountain feeling like a different species than the one that had walked up it. Every sense felt sharper. The world felt alive in a way I had never experienced before.

I did not know it then, but that mountain would change the question I was asking.

For years I had been trying to help people find meaning through thinking: better frameworks, clearer goals, sharper self-awareness. What four days without food on a mountain taught me is that meaning does not live where I had been looking for it; it lives in the body and is awakened by the doing.

There is a strange assumption hiding underneath much of modern life. We believe that if we think long enough, clearly enough, honestly enough, we will eventually figure out what we are meant to do. So we read another book, listen to another podcast, journal another page. We wait for clarity, wait for confidence, wait until the whole path is visible before we are willing to take a single step. I have spent fifteen years coaching people, and I have watched hundreds of intelligent, capable adults stall out in exactly this way, not because they lack insight but because they have too much of it and not enough motion. Now I don’t mean motion in the sense of exercise but motion in a deeper way.

The people I have admired most didn’t think their way into meaningful lives. They moved. They took jobs they were not ready for. They fell in love at inconvenient times. They started businesses before they knew exactly what they were doing. And when you ask them now how they ended up where they are, almost none of them describe a plan that worked. They describe a series of movements, some clumsy, some beautiful, that slowly became a life.

Looking back, meaning was not waiting for them at the end of some path. It was being built with every step.

I think about this constantly now, but I did not always. For years I ran a coaching practice organized around performance. I helped people get stronger, hit targets, operate at a higher level. The work was good, and I believed in it (still do). But something kept nagging at me, which is that the people who were performing the best were often the ones who felt the least. They had optimized their lives so thoroughly that there was nothing left that surprised them or asked them to become someone they had not already been. Everything was... fine. And “fine,” if you sit with it long enough, might be the most unsettling word in the English language, because it describes a life where nothing is wrong and nothing is alive.

Over a decade ago I sold most of what I owned, and spent a year traveling the world with one question I could not put down: how do people build lives that actually mean something to them? The honest answer is that I expected to find a new framework, a better model, something I could bring home and teach. What I found instead was an old pattern that modern life has quietly abandoned.

Everywhere I looked in the historical and anthropological record, humans were doing the same thing. They were deliberately choosing difficulty, not as punishment or performance, but as a way of becoming. The ancient Greeks built the Olympics around a concept called arete, the full realization of human potential through embodied excellence, and the athletes who trained for years were not chasing trophies... they were demonstrating what a human being was capable of becoming. Celtic and Norse cultures required young men to lift specific stones as a rite of passage into adulthood, witnessed by the community, with the understanding that the lifting was never about the stone. It was about who you became by moving it. The Lakota practiced Hanbleceya, crying for a vision, sending individuals alone into the wilderness to fast and face themselves. Australian Aboriginal walkabout sent adolescents into the wild for months. Jesus went into the desert for forty days before he began his ministry.

Across cultures that had no contact with one another, the same structure appeared: leave the familiar world, face something genuinely hard, and return changed. The ordeal was not incidental to the transformation. It was the mechanism of it. And then, somewhere along the way, we mostly stopped.

We still have birthdays and graduations, but those are celebrations of continuity, not ordeals that reorganize a person. I think a lot of the quiet emptiness I see in my coaching practice comes from this loss. Not because people need to suffer, but because they have stopped putting themselves in situations where something real is at stake, where the body is asked to do something the mind is not sure it can, where the old story about who you are has a chance of breaking open.

That year changed my question. I stopped asking how people find meaning and started asking how people build it, because everything I was seeing pointed in the same direction: meaning is not a thought you finally have. It is a pattern that emerges from how you spend your days, who you spend them with, and what you keep coming back to when nothing is forcing you to.

I started connecting what I had seen to the research I had studied in my Master’s degree program at Penn in Positive Psychology, the science of well-being and human flourishing. Albert Bandura spent decades showing that the single strongest source of believing in your own capability is what he called mastery experience, the actual lived event of doing something difficult and surviving it. Not reading about it, not visualizing it, not being told you can. Doing it. The body produces a fact that the mind cannot argue with, and that fact becomes the foundation of a different kind of confidence than any pep talk or affirmation could ever build.

Dan McAdams’ work on narrative identity showed something I found equally important: that we construct our sense of self through a running autobiography, a story we keep revising based on the events of our lives. McAdams found that adults whose life stories moved from difficulty toward hard-won resolution reported higher well-being than people whose stories moved in the other direction. It was not that content people told content stories. It was that the turn itself, the movement from something hard into something meaningful, was where the growth lived. Which means the difficult chapter is not the part you rush past. It is the part the rest of the story gets built around.

I did not learn any of this from reading.

I learned it from my body and then found the research that explained what had already happened.

I have kept the content of what I found on that mountain off the page, because I was taught that a vision retold too often becomes a story you remember instead of a truth you carry. What I will say is that everything the research describes... those days produced it in the body before I had a name for any of it.

The body stores a version of your story that is harder to fake than the one you tell people at dinner.

I think this might be the most important idea I have come across in fifteen years of coaching. When you do something physically difficult that you chose on purpose, something that puts real stakes on the table and asks you to become someone you have not been before, the body produces evidence that the mind cannot dismiss. A hundred miles finished on foot is not an argument; it is a fact. And that fact quietly rewrites the estimate you carry of yourself in a way that no book or podcast or therapy session can fully replicate, because the proof arrived through the body, where it cannot be reasoned away. The mind can talk itself out of almost anything. It has a harder time talking itself out of what the body has just done.

I am not suggesting that everyone needs to run an ultra or fast on a mountain. That is one of the mistakes the wellness industry keeps making, confusing the form with the function. A woman I coached ran her first half marathon at seventy-five. The race was the part everyone saw, but the work was in the months before it, the slow accumulation of training in which a body that had never done this became one that could. By the finish line she knew, in a way no encouragement from anyone else could have produced, that the limits she had assumed about her age and her body were not where she had placed them. A first 5K can be as transformative as a hundred-mile race if it sits at the edge of what you can currently do and you chose it because it means something to you. The question is not how hard is it by some objective standard, but how hard is it for you, and are you willing to let it change the story you have been telling yourself?

Most meaningful movement is not dramatic. It is signing up for the dance class you have been putting off. It is taking your kids camping for the first time. It is walking into the climbing gym even though you feel out of place. It is introducing yourself to the stranger at the coffee shop. The point is not to become an ultrarunner. The point is to move toward something that asks a little more of you than yesterday did.

This is what I have come to call Meaning in Motion. Meaningful lives are rarely designed in advance but rather they are built through repeated encounters with challenge, curiosity, uncertainty, and action, and the building happens in the body as much as in the mind. The body is not separate from meaning. It is one of the primary places where meaning actually gets made. We have access to the oldest and most reliable mechanism for human transformation, one that cultures across the world once provided on purpose, and the question is whether we are willing to recover it.

I do not have the full answer to the question I started with. I am suspicious of anyone who claims they do. But I have a working conviction, built from years of coaching, from the research, from the historical record, and from my own body’s testimony: that meaning is built long before it is understood. That you cannot think your way into a meaningful life any more than you can think your way into being a good swimmer.

At some point you have to get in the water.

The path opens as you walk.

If this idea resonated with you, I’ve included Field Guide No. 1: Meaning, a practical four-step guide designed to help you stop waiting for clarity and start building meaning through action.

Download Field Guide No. 1

Fifteen minutes a day, three weeks, one notebook. I hope it gets you moving.

And if someone came to mind while you were reading this, I’d love it if you shared it with them. The ideas that have shaped my life were almost always passed from one person to another, and maybe this one can do the same.

Share Meaning in Motion

—Mike