“And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.”

— Goethe

Fired up

Our darkest hour is the staging post of our finest hour.

Perhaps you lost all your money, lost a job, lost a home, lost a love, lost mobility or all of those things. Perhaps you never had anything worth losing. Perhaps it’s you who is lost.

But you’re still breathing.

And if you’re still breathing, you can and will walk out of the fire, reborn and unstoppable.

Fire destroys. But it also lights the darkness and facilitates renewal.

It reforges.

If your life is in pieces, we aren’t here to glue those pieces back together. If it broke, it was weak in the first place.

And if your life isn’t in pieces (yet)?

We’re going to break it into pieces, anyway. And reforge it.

Into something unbreakable.

You have a rendezvous with destiny, like it or not. And not liking it is perhaps why the fire started in the first place.

I don’t speak from the high ground. Like so many of us, I had to learn all this the hard way...

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My life had crashed and burned. Personal, professional, you name it. Rock-bottom.

It was as if I’d been playing on train tracks for years but only suddenly noticing the oncoming train before it splattered me.

Maybe deep down I wanted to splatter.

My second ex-wife, Jenna, found me passed out in her spare bedroom, an almost empty vodka bottle in one hand, and a Glock 20 pistol in the other. I vaguely recall hearing her say, “What the ****?” when she first saw me there. Then I heard her scream, “What the ****!?” when she saw what I was holding. I was half asleep as she gently pulled the gun from my cold fingers and darted out of the room with it.

I later woke up, my head aching as my face sank from the realization that my life wasn’t just a bad dream, after all.

While I had slept, Jenna had called my mother back in England and they had arranged for me to fly “home” for seven days.

Their plan made sense. England. A place where you’d probably go to jail for even thinking about guns. But I’d been living in Florida for years, so maybe I was out of touch.

I thought it was a ridiculous idea. I swept it aside and continued the pity-party, living in my ex-wife’s spare bedroom, drowning sorrows in cheap vodka.

Every day was a replay. Yesterday bled into tomorrow; there was never a today. It was as if I lived in a glass sphere, watching normal people move through happy lives on the outside.

Around a week later, I woke up in the middle of the night because of what seemed like a runny nose. I walked into the bathroom and saw blood streaming down my face. It was a heavy nosebleed, cause unknown.

I sobbed over the bloodied sink.

Blood and tears.

Sweat was the only thing missing.

A few days later, I felt tingles in my left arm and my chest felt like a washing machine full of golf balls. “Oh, God. No. Oh, God.”

I was no doctor, but I thought I knew what this meant. The blood drained from my face. I was suddenly terrified that I might lose… lose what? The life that evidently wasn’t worth a damn, anyway?

They rushed me to the hospital. When a middle-aged guy complaining about chest pains and a loss of sensation on one side walks into ER, they don’t screw around. Within ten minutes, I was admitted and connected to every monitor they could find.

I wondered if they’d even find a pulse, but I let myself be swept along and swallowed up, encircled by caregivers.

A parade of nurses and doctors came and went.

After two days of tests, I was oddly sad to admit the chest pain and left-side tingles had subsided. In fact, the doctors scratched their heads after the ultrasound and treadmill as they playfully declared, “Dude, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re actually in great shape!”

According to medicine, anyway.

Is there a blood test that shows when a person has lost their soul? Is there a DNA test that tells us what the point of it all is? Does an ultrasound of the heart reveal when it’s been broken one time too many?

Right before they discharged me, Jenna sat at my bedside while my mother called to ask me to “come home for seven days.”

“Why?” I said, sucking on a juice box I couldn’t taste, “I don’t see the point.”

Jenna frowned, eyes steady on me. “Because you need this.”

She’d always said I had a self-destruct button that I kept on pushing.

“Right now,” I replied, “I need a depressing English winter like I need a bullet to the brain.” Considering recent events, I realized the phrase to be a little too true for comfort, but it was out of my mouth now.

An awkward pause.

“I got the ticket,” my mother said.

One thing about growing up on the flight path of London Heathrow airport and being raised by an airline family is that there was never a shortage of plane tickets to throw around. I thought it was a pointless idea, but I went along.

As I was packing, burrowing through what was left of my belongings in a tiny closet, my eye caught a leather document pouch that had been buried under a pile of junk.

I stared at it and gulped. It filled me with shame.

Why?

Okay. Do you want to know the really insane part about all this? The really embarrassing part. The part that made me want to “fall on my sword,” to borrow a shamed samurai’s poetic end…

I had made my fortune as a “guru.” A personal development, wealth-building, health-building, motivational “guru.”

For decades I had been telling people how not to do exactly what I had done, to avoid the mistakes I had made, to “never give up” the way I was giving up.

Vodka. I was the one people came to for answers. Years of guiding others, standing on stages, speaking truths that felt solid. Until one day, I found myself in the very abyss I thought I had taught others to climb out of. The kind of collapse that makes a mockery of everything you once believed.

And now that I was the one who needed help, when it came to swallowing my own medicine I had spat it out.

That leather document pouch I saw in the closet contained all my personal development teaching notes. It even contained the tiny microphone I’d tape to my face at seminars; now it seemed like a museum piece. An artifact of shame.

I hadn’t read these notes for years. I didn’t open the leather pouch, but I felt strangely compelled to pack it. I dropped it into my carry-on bag as if it was a soiled diaper.

As I boarded the British Airways plane on a stormy night in Miami, I glared at the economy seat I’d been allocated. It seemed absurdly small. On a night flight, I was expected to sleep in this crib of a seat. I used to fly business class so often I took it for granted. Was this my new life?

I listened to the captain do his briefing and wondered why the hell I hadn’t remained an airline captain (my former life), cruising through an easy career, and soon to be retired.

I felt ashamed to the bone, as if the other passengers now filling the cabin were laughing at me with my tiny seat. I grumbled a coping strategy to myself, hoping the whole cabin would somehow hear me: “I’ll just bury myself in martinis, movies, and melatonin until I pass the **** out, then this nightmare will be over.”

I settled into my crib. The first movie I pulled up on my iPad was Fight Club, and half an hour in, Brad Pitt tried to console me. He said, “You know, man, it could be worse. A woman could cut off your ***** while you're sleeping and toss it out the window of a moving car.”

There’s always that.

Only I didn’t even have a woman to cut off my *****, said one voice in my head—for the first time in my adult life, I wasn’t in a serious relationship. Another voice said: Brad’s right. It could be worse.

My eyes wandered down to my carry-on backpack jammed under my feet, and the leather document pouch shoved inside it. That Fight Club scene reminded me of a story from an ancient text (The Dhammapada) I knew was somewhere in the thick stack of notes in that pouch:

Buddha visited a village that was suffering from a plague. A woman ran out to him, distraught over her son recently dying.

“Oh, Buddha! Please help me. I am lost in sorrow. Is there anything you can do?”

Buddha said, “Yes. Bring me some mustard seed from someone else’s house.”

The woman dutifully agreed.

As she was walking away, Buddha added, “But this mustard seed must come from a household that has not experienced death.”

The woman agreed.

Hours passed, and Buddha waited.

Eventually, the woman returned, exasperated. “Buddha, I cannot find such a household.”

And the lesson was learned.

Bah. Self-help playbook, I thought.

I had helped so many people by speaking this way, but did I believe in it myself? Did I feel it? Did I live it?

Perhaps this was a start.

I abandoned the “martinis, movies, melatonin, and pass the **** out” plan. I plucked out the leather document pouch and started reading like a stern critic.

As I read into the night, bumping through trans-Atlantic turbulence, surrounded by snoring passengers, the tiny spotlight above seemed like an interrogation lamp.

Two realizations slapped me in the face:

1.     I hadn’t practiced a lot of what I’d preached.

2.     And who cares because I didn’t agree with a lot of this material anymore, anyway!

But there was a silver-lining. The steady accumulation of all these notes reminded me of those past years. How I had stared down the barrel of a gun several times before, in different ways, under different skies.

And I had prevailed.

I used to laugh in the face of adversity, burning naysayers as my rocket fuel. Whenever someone would tell me “It can’t be done” or “that’s impossible,” I would actually get excited.

What had changed?

Why was I struggling to relight the “rocket engines” one last time?

The plane slumped onto a damp runway on a March morning that was even gloomier than I’d expected in London. I couldn’t bear to see my reflection as the automated customs gate took my picture before letting me pass. Catatonic, I sank down an escalator and snaked through a blur of underground passageways to baggage reclaim. Then I met my mother on the other side.

I knew I was now a mere shade of the vibrant and successful son who once had it all, and I felt ashamed to stand there before her. Not that she would ever judge me because of it. We hugged. I wanted to cry but I knew it would upset her and only add to my shame.

After sleepwalking to her car, I slept all the way to her house, drifting in and out of sleep, as we drove west into afternoon sun. A strange dream. I felt like a half-dead soldier who’d just been airlifted from the battlefield.

When we arrived in Somerset, she showed me the tiny spare room she’d prepared for me. My “life story” photo album lay on a lovingly made collapsible bed. The room had navy walls and a small circular window speckled with rain. My cave for the week.

When she left the room, I placed the half-empty photo album on my lap but didn’t open it. I just stared at the jacket.

The contents of that photo album now seemed to have been for nothing; a record of decades of “success,” work, relationships, and striving. And all the fruits of it, now smoke and ash.

And that’s when I wondered (again) if there was any point to going on?

Could I really pull myself back up and do it all over again?

Did I even want to? Was it worth it? The struggle, the trials, the effort.

 The shame and embarrassment, even if I tried.

How could I speak from a position of authority after what had happened to me? Not being a hypocrite was perhaps the last virtue I had left.

Afternoon sun caught the tiny window and lit my cave.

Then I stared at the photo album jacket again. I contemplated what lay inside it.

Is that how the half-empty album should end? With failure. My final self-help “lesson” to my children and all who looked up to me: “When life knocks you on your ***… head for the exit.”

Since disaster had crept up on me, life had felt surreal—like I’d walked into an episode of The Twilight Zone.

A familiar smell from the kitchen sparked childhood memories.

And then, in that feeling, recalling The Twilight Zone— that old TV show I watched with my mother as a child— I remembered something about it: there was usually a moral to the story in those supernatural thrillers…

The character in each episode was often getting a trial by fire, a role-reversal, a warning, or a second chance in a “ghosts of Christmas past” kind of way.

I imagined how my episode might look had my story been on the show:

Me crying in a corner on the floor, half-naked, surrounded by ashes, as a dark and smoldering demon towered over me, growling, “For years you’ve been giving all this advice to others… not from a position of experience but from your ivory tower! Ha. Well, now you’re in the shoes of those who came to you for help; broken, ruined, desperate, and directionless… Now let’s see you dig your way out…”

The frivolous distraction jarred my mind and a shudder went down my spine. That demon’s voice was too real. It felt more like an intervention than an imagining. And I felt something shift within.

For months I had been asking, “Why did this happen to ME?!”

Suddenly, I found myself asking, “WHY did this happen to me?”

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Same sentence, different emphasis on a single word… it changes everything.

Everything.

Say the same thing differently and witness a death sentence transform into a mission statement...

Witness a self-pitying victim transform into an empowered human being about to embark on the ultimate journey...

Witness a glimpse of a future promise enter the void...

Simply witness.

Why did this happen?

I’m not talking about the superficial and obvious: “because a car hit me,” “because my partner left me,” “because I lost my job,” “because they died of cancer.” We’re looking for the deeper reason.

What if the worst thing that happened to you was the only thing that could have shaped you into what you were meant to become?

That was the moment I saw it differently.

Our life is now on a different trajectory. Like a meteor bumped off course by a collision with another meteor, now headed for a different galaxy, a new timeline.

A reset.

We may not like it, but there is no denying it.

Sometimes disaster strikes as a way of forcing us onto the true path. And I know it sucks to hear that right now, but what are the alternative ways of looking at it? That events are completely random and there is no point to it all? That God hates us? That one should seek vengeance?

Where are those viewpoints taking us?

Nowhere good.

The skeptic might argue, “Bull****. We choose our own destiny.”

I think that’s a common confusion that needs clearing up:

We choose our own future.

But destiny is not the future; it’s one of many possible futures. Destiny just happens to be one possible future we can choose to live. A future that, for reasons we’ll explore later, is the optimal path for us through life— a path that, if we are paying attention to the serendipitous clues, will reveal itself to us—we’ll return to this idea on Day 7.

Whether we choose to follow that path or not is up to us because we choose our future. But crisis will keep nudging or slapping us until we pay attention to it.

We choose our future, not our destiny.

From a certain point of view— the constructive point of view— there appears to be a hidden meaning behind all events, and it is serving our evolution. The deeper reason may not yet be clear, but before the end of this book I will make it clear.

All I ask from you now is that you simply be open to the idea that there is a reason for where you are right now. However unjust. However cruel. However heart wrenching. However twisted.

Have faith in the WHY.

I know that’s a hard idea to swallow, so allow me to build on it.

Things have not gone according to plan. Maybe that’s an understatement. But nevertheless, the pain we feel now is because what we expected to happen in our lives did not happen, right?

In other words, pain, struggle, disappointment, and sadness are all a function of life not meeting our expectations.

So, what if our expectations were flawed?

What if we got the expected ‘dream delivery date’ wrong? You know that invisible date or age we set for ourselves—the one by which we thought we’d have “made it.”

There are no broken dreams if the dream isn’t over.

Things have happened. Things have not happened. We have regrets. We’ve fantasized about owning a time machine that could whisk us back to those critical plot points in our life— a story that we’ve rewritten a thousand times in our heads, starting with these two words:

“If only…”

If only we’d made a different choice back then, our life would look a lot different today.

Yes, life could well have looked a lot different today; possibly a lot worse.

The thing is, we don’t know for sure that the things that did or didn’t happen are “good” or “bad” because our life story remains unfinished. And it will never be fully told if we don’t move our story forward.

We need to zoom out from this moment in our lives and see the bigger picture.

Our personal history is a one-sided story, a one-way road taken at the expense of other roads that each led to unknowns that shall remain unknowns.

We know nothing about how our lives would have panned out had things happened or not happened to us, because our life story remains unfinished.

We don’t know the ending yet.

When the 19^th century philosopher, Schopenhauer, looked back on his life, he said it often appeared to have a certain structure, with events seeming to be interconnected, like the plot points of a story. Like things were meant to happen, contributing to a bigger and meaningful picture. He conceded that this could’ve been purely our minds creating such a structure to try to make sense of it all, rather than some kind of divine intervention or providence.

Jung offered an explanation that straddled both sides of Schopenhauer’s argument with what he called “synchronicity;” the idea of meaningful coincidences.

Whether there is a hidden structure to it all or we are unconsciously creating such a structure to make sense of it, it’s all the same:

There is a structure to our individual life stories.

That’s why all good stories have structure. A structure that helps us find meaning, just as a young child tries to make sense of the world they are suddenly born into.

A cherished theme of Hinduism is that Krishna (God) created the world as his play, and we are the characters who perform a story upon it, each with different roles to play. Ancient Greeks articulated the concept of tragedy into theater, to remind us of the things that happen and that it is all part of nature.

What ancient Greeks and Hindus were trying to say is, “Life is like this.” Art is life, or it wouldn’t be art. Art is not art unless it resonates with our souls.

Today, Hollywood is our theater, and the same message is subliminally woven into the movies that move us, particularly in terms of this hidden structure behind the action and dialogue.

“Life isn’t a movie,” some might say. When it comes to this hidden structure, I disagree.

Good movies aren’t an escape from life; they’re a guidebook about life. As movie critic, Kenneth Burke said, “Stories are equipment for living.” The screenplay schoolmaster, Robert McKee said, “Story isn’t a flight from reality but a vehicle that carries us on our search for reality.”

And the quintessential story is one where there is a “death” and a “resurrection.”

There can be no resurrection without death. Not the kind of death where our heart stops. I mean the kind of death where our heart starts. Where it stops being shoved into second place behind our mind.

This storyline of death and rebirth is evidently written into our genes as much as into our most ancient and cherished texts. It’s metaphor language for a fall from grace and a comeback. This is why underdog and Cinderella plots are so powerful and moving for us, because deep down we know that “Life is like this.”

Or, at least, life could… and should be like this.

Whether it actually does play out like that or not is in our hands.

The best stories are ones of transformation, and they follow a classic story structure:

We see the protagonist’s life irreversibly changed by an event.

There is change.

Then there is a long struggle as the protagonist tries to dig a way out of the crisis.

And along the way, there is a change to their character. The journey— the change and the struggle— is making them stronger and more complete. They find their true nature and transform into a more complete individual.

The message? There was at least one section in my self-help playbook pouch that I still agreed with— had to agree with— even if I was yet to walk this talk:

Yes, there is a mountain to climb. But the climbing of it is what makes us. And sometimes we finally get what we want only to discover that now we don’t want it, because of who we became on the journey.

Superhero stories usually start with a personal catastrophe that ends up being for the better only when they embraced the catastrophe. When they surrendered to destiny.

And would any movie ending be as meaningful without struggle? Screenwriters know that only conflict and adversity can drive a story forward. And this resonates with us because “life is like this.”

So, with a big picture view, what if nothing is going wrong in our story?

Stories, like life, have a three-act structure. It plays out something like this (note the emphasis):

Act One: Throw hero into dark pit.

Act Two (the longest act by far): Throw rocks at hero in dark pit. At very end of Act Two, push hero to breaking point and make it seem that there is no hope. Start shoveling dirt in the pit to bury this battered and bleeding hero. This is the low point, the point where we are now.

Act Three: Surprise hero by making the crumbling dirt from above expose tree roots to create a ladder to climb out of dark pit. But if the hero had given up, he would never have seen this opportunity.

This is why we say, “It’s always darkest before dawn.” Because we sense or see the truth in it.

As any trained screenwriter knows, to craft a good story bad things must happen to the hero. But, as just explained, these “bad things” typically reach a crescendo at the very end of Act Two. You know, this is the point in the story where the well laid plan seemed to be going so well, but now all seems lost...

The hero has fought hard, but in vain it seems because the villain laid a trap or didn’t die after all, game over. If only (here we go again) the hero had made a different choice or just stayed at home.

Would you judge the movie at this point?

No. Because the story remains unfinished.

The audience knows how the story will end: the hero will win (or they’ll throw popcorn at the screen). But they sit on the edge of their seats regardless because they can’t see how it will play out in the third and final act.

So they keep watching.

As must we.

Stay to the end. Let us not “walk out” of our own movie just when we’re about to get to the good part.

Do you know many good stories that end with the hero throwing in the towel and so the bad guy wins?

Art and life are one and the same. The three-act story structure exists for a reason:

It’s what it means to be human.

This is not the end. It’s only the end of our Second Act. Our Third Act has begun and it’s waiting for us to make a choice:

Option A: Go back. Return to how things were, stay in our comfort zone (of misery), and therefore continue to get more of the same. Or completely give up.

Option B: Bravely move forward and reforge our life, whatever that may entail.

 Life is about making choices. Specifically, choosing between truth (however inconvenient) or ignorance. Sometimes the real problem isn’t a wrong choice, but standing frozen between them.

Take Option B with me.

Don’t walk out of your own movie.

Keep watching and let it play out to the end.

Act Three is where amazing things can happen if our eyes are open to seeing them.

Our final act is the first act of the rest of our lives.

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The fire in my belly may have been drowned by sorrow, but at least now there was a spark. And a tiny spark is all it takes to conquer the mightiest castle.

I sprang to my feet, eyes wide. My photo album wasn’t half-empty. It was half-full. And I could choose the photos that would fill the remaining pages. This time I would ensure it was the right photos.

I decided I would give myself the next seven days to reforge my life.

Give yourself the same.

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