I trust the way she takes me.

Life has its own plans when you are making yours.

It didn’t happen all that fast. But there have been whispers. In fact, the whispers came right at the beginning telling me that it wasn’t quite it. 

And that has made me ask the question a lot lately – well what is it?

Surprisingly, the answer wasn’t as complicated as I thought it was going to be. But it did involve me really taking some time to understand what was missing here.

And what I am missing is connection.

The type of connection that I have with my closest friends back home. I didn’t really understand how much that meant to me until I got here and didn’t feel my roots being nourished anymore. If I have to be completely honest, I don’t think I really gave those relationships enough time to grow.

I also realized in having done this over the past 3 months that maybe there is a happy middle ground to doing all of this. Maybe there’s a better way for me to be doing all of this traveling and still be able to maintain those relationships back home and keep my sense of roots – a place to always come back to.

I couldn’t have understood any of this until I got here.

But there’s something else calling me. I’ve left something unfinished. For a second I really had to do a gut reality check to make sure I wasn’t fooling myself. But after the past few months of hearing this speak to me, I know that there’s something here.

Last year, I stepped into a moment – literally almost exactly one year ago – that was pretty life changing.

I had spent 15 years dreaming and 7 years working towards a goal that had a lot of meaning for me. It was far more than just a fitness photo shoot. It was a representation of breaking free from something that had help me back for such a long time. If you want to read that story, please go here to My Untold Story.

But the truth is, as amazing as that time was for me, there were so many bad things happening that I didn’t even really get to enjoy it at all. I spent months training as hard as I could, stepped into a dream, and yet at the same time I was in tears because other areas of my life were falling apart.

And unfortunately that was just the beginning of it all. Things got progressively harder and harder as I had to push everything aside that was going on with me and start taking care of someone else.

The greatest moment of my life felt like a brief flash and it was gone faster than it should have.

But here’s where it really got me. As the year has gone on, I’ve looked back time and time again only to see that time of my life as incredibly dark and painful. Did I learn a lot? Of course. But I just kept feeling so unsettled. I wasn’t satisfied with it. I was still hungry to make that moment mine.

I knew I had to go back and do it again.

I do have to go back and do it again. I have to claim it for myself. I have to make it mine.

I don’t really believe in accidents. I believe that everything that happens in our life is happening for a reason that helps us grow and move forward. We have the choice to view things in such a way where they can make us better or they can actually make us move backwards.

As hard as it was, I decided to look at things in such a way that they could improve my life rather than set me backwards 10 steps. I didn’t want to shut down because I was hurting. I wanted, as much as I could, to stay open and let myself continue to grow.

As I have taken that path instead of the path of closing all of my doors up, I’ve noticed that there are still some things that I feel like I need to do to set my course going in the right direction. Pieces seem to constantly be falling into place. They all start coming together and it helps me see what I’m supposed to do.

And what I need to do…is make a change. I need to make that change for myself because it feels right.

I need to head back in one more time and do this thing right.

I’ve healed.

Now I’m ready.

Evan Sanders
The Better Man Project