I do worry that I am not doing more with my life.
Not more in the way the world usually means it.
Not more money.
Not more achievements.
Not more status.
There is something in me that keeps pushing toward expression, toward risk, toward the uncomfortable places where growth lives.
The challenge is that we live in a world obsessed with more.
More information.
More productivity.
More optimisation.
So it can be difficult to tell the difference between the more that belongs to us and the more that belongs to everyone else.
How do we know when life is genuinely asking something of us?
And how do we know when we’re simply responding to pressure?
Many years ago I started doing vision quests in Brazil. I was twenty-nine, and the more inside me was calling me out of my comfort zone and into something that felt like an initiation.
I knew this more was right for me.
I needed something that would move me into manhood, into adulthood.
I may have looked and spoken like a man, but on the inside, parts of me had not yet made that crossing.
I wanted certainty.
I wanted confidence.
I wanted to know that I had what it takes.
Looking back, I thought the mountain was going to give me something.
I didn’t yet understand that it was also going to take something away.
We weren’t allowed plastic—only skins and natural materials. I had made a kind of makeshift tarp with beeswax, which, looking back, was already showing its fault lines.
At the time I thought it was a problem with the tarp.
Years later, I realised it was showing me something about myself.
I had grown up with an absent father and a mother who carried more than she should have had to carry.
And somewhere in that arrangement, I had learned two things at the same time.
How to lean.
And how not to trust that I would be held.
Those lessons sat quietly beneath the surface of my life for years.
The mountain was about to bring them into the open.
On that mountain, the conditions were just right to expose all of this.
I was the only non-Brazilian. The others seemed completely at home in the ritual, in their bodies, in the land itself.
From where I stood, they looked like men who belonged there.
And those old feelings came up again.
That I didn’t have what they had.
That I wasn’t ready.
That somehow everyone else had received a handbook for life that had passed me by.
And the truth is, I wasn’t ready.
Which is what made the quest right for me in all the wrong ways.
There is a community at the base of the mountain. Each person is taken to their own place and surrounded by 365 tobacco prayer ties.
Once you enter that circle, you don’t leave until the quest is over—unless you choose to come down.
Morning and night, the community sings for you from below.
I loved that part.
Somewhere beyond the trees, people were holding you in their prayers. You couldn’t see them, but you knew they were there.
And yet, in the end, none of them could do the quest for you.
It was just you and you.
I settled in. The first day and night passed.
The fasting.
The discomfort.
The waiting.
Then the rain came.
And it didn’t stop.
Through the second day.
Into the third night.
Everything I had brought with me slowly stopped working.
The tarp leaked.
The ground turned to mud.
My clothes stayed wet.
By then I had dug myself into the earth and covered myself with leaves, trying to hold onto whatever warmth I could find.
The mountain seemed indifferent to all of it.
That night was one of the hardest nights of my life.
Not because I was in danger.
Because I had run out of ways to convince myself I was in control.
The next morning wasn’t really a waking. It was just a continuation.
I was cold. Wet. And done.
So I went down—one day short.
I felt like I had failed.
Not because of the weather.
Because I had come all this way looking for something, and I hadn’t completed what I set out to do.
The story I carried about myself felt confirmed.
Maybe I didn’t have what it takes after all.
A few days later, I sat with a Brazilian elder.
She asked me why I had come down.
I remember feeling almost offended by the question. Had she not seen the weather?
The rain had been relentless. Everything I brought had failed. I was cold, exhausted and miserable.
The answer seemed obvious.
But she looked at me and said:
Abandonment.
You felt abandoned.
It took me years to understand what she meant.
At the time I thought she was talking about the rain.
She wasn’t.
Underneath the cold, the discomfort and the struggle was a feeling I had known for much longer.
That I was on my own.
That nobody was coming.
That if I couldn’t carry myself, I would not be carried.
The mountain hadn’t created that feeling.
It had revealed it.
I was still, in some way, looking for my mother.
Only now there was no shelter.
No rescue.
No one to make it easier.
Just me.
And something in me had to cross.
That, I came to see, was more.
Not finishing the quest.
Not proving anything.
Not becoming stronger.
But moving.
Moving from dependence to responsibility.
Moving from waiting to choosing.
Moving from being carried by life to carrying myself.
The crossing had already begun long before I came down the mountain.
That, I came to see, was more.
Not finishing the quest.
Not proving anything.
But moving.
You can’t do a vision quest every day.
But the movement doesn’t stop.
We are always crossing something.
A fear.
A loss.
An old story about ourselves.
Life keeps asking us to leave one shore and step onto another.
The difficulty is that we live in a culture obsessed with a different kind of more.
More achievement.
More optimisation.
More productivity.
More certainty.
I saw a headline recently: you have two years to upskill yourself or else.
The “else” carries a threat.
Fall behind.
Become irrelevant.
Get left behind.
But that is not the more I’m speaking about.
The more that is ours arrives differently.
Sometimes it asks something big of us.
A mountain.
A relationship.
A career change.
More often it asks something smaller.
A difficult conversation.
A risk.
A truth we have been avoiding.
A single step across an invisible threshold.
In a world that moves this fast, perhaps the real challenge is slowing down enough to notice what life is asking of us.
To listen.
To feel where movement wants to happen.
And then to take the next step.
Not because it is clear.
Not because success is guaranteed.
But because something in us knows the crossing is ours.