This is the third and final article in The Life That Is Yours, a series about authority, identity, and the difficult freedom of being human.
Nobody Is Coming to Tell You Who You ** Are** explored what happens when we stop looking outside ourselves for the authority to define our lives.
This final article takes the next step. If nobody else can author your life, and there is no finished version of yourself waiting somewhere ahead, then the task is not to arrive at the right life. It is to inhabit the one already happening.
We often imagine understanding should come first and living should follow. Much of life happens the other way around. We choose, love, lose, change, and become without fully understanding what any of it means.
Life does not wait for us to figure it out.
There is a bargain many of us make with life without realizing we have made it. We tell ourselves that once we understand what is happening, we will know how to live. Once I know what I believe, once I understand who I am, once I can see where this relationship is going, once I have made sense of what happened to me, then I will be ready to move.
We imagine clarity as the condition for participation, as though life will eventually provide enough information for us to proceed with confidence. But much of being human happens before that clarity arrives. We make choices while still uncertain, love people without knowing what will become of the relationship, inhabit identities that are still changing, and move through experiences whose meaning will not become visible until years later.
There is good reason to want understanding. I have spent much of my life trying to understand human experience, and much of my work now involves finding better language for what it means to be alive. Reflection gives shape to experience, and language helps us recognize what previously existed only as a feeling, an uneasiness, or a question difficult to formulate. Some things about our lives become understandable only after we have lived through them. The problem begins when understanding becomes a prerequisite for living.
But life does not wait for our understanding.
While the mind is interpreting what has happened, something else is already happening. Identity takes shape even as we try to determine who we are becoming. Relationships are being lived while their meaning remains uncertain. Our actual lives continue through ordinary mornings, unfinished conversations, changing bodies, unexpected losses, people arriving and disappearing, decisions whose consequences remain unseen, and moments whose significance will not become clear until years later.
The usual assumption is that understanding comes first and living follows. Much of the time, life happens first, and its meaning takes years to emerge.
Religion gave me an explanation for almost everything before I had experienced very much of anything.
There were doctrines to believe, scriptures to interpret, moral categories to inhabit, spiritual principles to apply, and a larger story that explained where I came from and where everything was supposedly going. Like many people formed inside a comprehensive religious system, I learned to experience life through an interpretive framework that preceded the experience itself.
The framework told me what things meant before I had fully encountered them. Suffering, desire, doubt, success, failure, marriage, sexuality, vocation, morality, death and identity all existed inside a story whose basic architecture had already been constructed. My responsibility was to discover where my life belonged within it.
There was genuine comfort in this. There was also a cost I could not see while I was inside it.
When a system supplies meaning in advance, it becomes difficult to distinguish between encountering reality and interpreting reality according to the system. Experience arrives already translated. Instead of asking what is actually happening, we learn to determine where what is happening belongs within what we have already been told.
This helps explain why leaving a comprehensive religious framework produces a disorientation that extends far beyond belief. What disappears is not only a set of theological propositions. An entire interpretive sequence has been disrupted.
Previously, explanation came first and experience was fitted inside it. Afterward, life begins arriving without the explanation.
One of the most consequential things I have learned since leaving the religious world that once organized my existence is that reality does not require my understanding in order to be real.
This seems obvious until we notice how much energy goes into making an experience intelligible before allowing ourselves to inhabit it. Grief is already moving through us before its dimensions are fully understood. An identity begins becoming uninhabitable long before language exists for the person emerging underneath it. A belief might weaken quietly for years before the conscious mind finally acknowledges what has changed.
Some of the most important transformations of our lives begin beneath the level of explanation. The story about what happened comes later.
Looking backward, a moment that seemed unremarkable at the time becomes the point when everything changed. A conversation altered the direction of a life, a friendship awakened something forgotten, a loss reorganized what mattered, or a decision regarded as temporary became a threshold between two different versions of our existence.
Retrospect gives the past a coherence that the present rarely possesses. From a distance, the road looks almost inevitable because its destination is already known. The person walking it had no such vantage point.
That person was standing inside an unfinished story, just as we are now.
We are remarkably skilled at judging our former selves with knowledge they did not possess.
From where we stand now, the warning signs seem clearer, along with the relationships that lasted too long, opportunities that went unrecognized, beliefs left unquestioned, and years spent inhabiting identities that have since become foreign to us. What is obvious in retrospect begins to feel as though it should have been obvious all along.
I know this temptation in my own life. There are parts of my story I understand very differently now than I did while living them. I have been a minister, a religious insider, a religious outsider, an activist, a writer, a spiritual director, and someone trying to find language for dimensions of human experience that my inherited categories could no longer hold. None of these identities arrived with an explanation of what they would eventually mean.
Even leaving Christianity did not come with a clear understanding of what would follow. I did not step out of one world carrying a fully formed philosophy of non-religious spirituality or a framework called existential health. Those emerged through years of living, listening, writing, accompanying people, changing my mind, following questions and discovering that some of the things I thought I had settled were still alive inside me.
From here, I can trace connections between those chapters. At the time, I was simply living them.
That distinction has made me more careful about judging earlier versions of myself. We often punish ourselves for not possessing yesterday what became knowable only today. Looking backward, it is easy to believe we should have understood sooner, left earlier, chosen differently, recognized what was happening, or known who we really were.
There are certainly times when something already known is deliberately avoided. Fear keeps people inside situations long after something within them has registered the truth. But not every delayed understanding is avoidance. Sometimes the experience, language, distance, freedom, or capacity necessary to see clearly simply did not exist yet.
A life lived forward should not be judged as though it were lived backward.
Meaning is often imagined as something contained inside an experience, almost as though events arrive carrying their own explanation. Think hard enough, process deeply enough, or find the right framework, and eventually the meaning will reveal itself.
Human lives are rarely so tidy.
What once looked like failure becomes liberation. What initially felt like liberation later reveals unforeseen costs. A relationship expected to last forever becomes important for entirely different reasons. An achievement once central to identity gradually becomes a footnote. A painful rupture becomes a dividing line that would never have been chosen but cannot be removed without becoming someone else.
This does not mean everything happens for a reason. I have no interest in rescuing that old religious formula by dressing it in secular language. Some things are devastating. Some losses do not conceal gifts, and some suffering diminishes rather than deepens us. No serious account of human existence should require us to manufacture redemption from everything that hurts.
The deeper point is that meaning is not always hidden inside an event waiting to be discovered. Human beings participate in making meaning through the ongoing relationship between what happened and who we are becoming.
That relationship changes because we change.
An experience at thirty does not necessarily mean the same thing when remembered at sixty. The historical facts remain, but the person encountering those facts again has lived another thirty years. New relationships illuminate old experiences. Greater self-knowledge exposes motives we could not previously recognize. Sometimes compassion for a younger self replaces the judgment through which we once viewed them.
Our lives do not simply accumulate experiences. Over time, we continually reorganize their significance.
Beneath our demand for understanding there is often something more vulnerable. We are afraid of getting our lives wrong.
We want enough clarity to protect ourselves from regret. If we knew which relationship would last, which work would matter, which place would become home, which version of ourselves was authentic, and which risks would eventually look foolish, we could make better decisions and avoid unnecessary loss.
Existence offers no such arrangement. Every serious choice is made with incomplete information. Every commitment opens some possibilities while closing others. Every relationship involves another person whose future self is as unknowable as our own. Even refusing to choose becomes a choice once enough time has passed.
This is where uncertainty becomes existential rather than merely psychological. It is not simply an information problem that better research will eventually correct. Uncertainty belongs to the structure of being alive in time.
The ultimate meaning of our choices remains unknowable because so much of what happens next remains unknown. More unsettling still, the person who eventually encounters those consequences will not be exactly the person making the choice today.
There is no observation deck outside our existence from which to examine the whole landscape before deciding how to cross it. We choose from inside the life we are already living.
This is one reason I have come to understand existential health less as the possession of answers and more as the development of capacities.
A person could possess an extraordinarily coherent philosophy of life and remain poorly equipped for the actual conditions of being human. Someone might have an elaborate explanation of mortality but little capacity to face death. Another person might speak eloquently about freedom while remaining terrified of consequential choice. We might celebrate uncertainty intellectually while quietly arranging our lives to avoid experiencing it.
Existential health reaches deeper than worldview. It concerns our relationship with meaning, identity, belonging, mortality, freedom, limitation, agency, uncertainty, spirituality and self-trust as these realities actually appear in lived experience.
The phrase relationship with matters because none of these conditions will finally be solved. Mortality will not be defeated through understanding. Identity will never become permanently settled. Meaning will change as life changes, and belonging will expose us to vulnerability precisely because other people matter to us.
One of the givens of human existence is that there is no finish line. There is no point at which we finally become complete enough, certain enough, healed enough, or self-knowing enough to begin living without remainder. Life remains unfinished for as long as it is being lived.
The task, then, is not to defeat unfinishedness but to become capable of inhabiting it. Participation does not require reality to explain itself first.
This requires a different relationship with understanding. Rather than insisting that understanding authorize participation, participation itself becomes a way of knowing. Life is lived and noticed, choices are made and reconsidered, losses reveal what mattered, and encounters with other people leave us altered through knowing them.
Understanding develops inside the living.
Our culture has become exceptionally good at observing itself. We analyze ourselves, track ourselves, diagnose ourselves, explain ourselves and optimize ourselves. We have access to psychological language, therapeutic concepts, personality systems, spiritual vocabularies, podcasts, books and algorithmically delivered explanations for nearly every dimension of human experience.
Much of this is valuable. Language has helped countless people recognize patterns they once endured without understanding, and there is real liberation in finally having words for something that previously remained unnamed.
Yet explanation eventually reaches its limits. There is a point at which observing life begins replacing participation in it.
You will not understand friendship entirely by studying attachment. No mastery of grief theory will tell you what it is like to reach for the phone and remember the person you want to call is dead. Love cannot be known without the vulnerability of allowing another person to matter. We do not discover what kind of person we are capable of becoming solely by examining the person we currently believe ourselves to be.
Certain forms of knowledge exist only through participation. Life teaches through contact, which is why the things we know most deeply are often difficult to reduce to propositions.
Reflection remains essential, but it belongs in conversation with experience rather than standing above it. We need language for our lives, but language should remain porous enough for life to contradict it.
I have spent years talking with people who are trying to figure out their lives. Their questions are serious: Should I stay or leave? What do I really believe? Who am I now? What should I do with the rest of my life? Was leaving religion a mistake? What does spirituality mean after certainty disappears? How do I know whether I can trust myself?
I recognize these questions because I have lived many of them myself. What interests me now is the assumption sometimes hiding underneath them: somewhere there must be an answer which, once discovered, will remove the burden of having to live without knowing.
For those of us shaped by Christianity, this assumption has a familiar history. Many of us were taught to search for “God’s will,” which meant there was supposedly a correct path through life and our responsibility was to discern it. Choosing rightly aligned us with a larger plan; choosing wrongly carried the terrifying possibility that we might miss…
