I Came Home With a Different Question

Sep.3, 2026
Honolulu, Hawaii

A glacier in Alaska, where the scale of the landscape makes you pause.

I recently came home to Hawaii after spending ten days in Alaska.

There were glaciers, small towns, long stretches of ocean, and views that made me stop and simply look. But strangely, after coming home, the thing I found myself thinking about most wasn’t Alaska.

It was my own life.

Travel has a way of doing that.

Sometimes we leave home expecting to discover a new place, and instead, the distance helps us see our own lives little differently. This time, I came home with a question:

What do I want the next few years of my life to look like?

Not what should I accomplish. Not what should I add to my schedule. Not even what should I do next. But what do I actually want my life to look like?

The plans we make belong to who we were then

I have always believed in planning.

For much of my life, goals, projects, deadlines and responsibilities were a natural part of how I moved forward. I still believe that having direction matters.

But I’ve also learned that a plan can be right for one version of you and no longer be right for the person you have become.

Ten years ago, we made decisions with the information, responsibilities, ambitions and priorities we had at that time.

Then life happened.

We learned.

We changed.

People entered and left our lives. Opportunities appeared that we could never have predicted. Things that once seemed important became less important. And sometimes things we barely noticed before began to matter much more.

So perhaps one of the questions we should ask ourselves from time to time is not simply:

Am I still following my plan?

But:

Does that plan still fit me?

Changing direction is not the same as starting over

I think we sometimes stay with old plans because changing them can feel like giving something up.

We’ve invested years in a career, an identity, a goal or a particular picture of what our future was supposed to look like.

Walking away from any part of that can feel uncomfortable. But I don’t see change that way anymore.

The years behind us are not wasted simply because the years ahead may look different. Everything we have done becomes part of what we bring with us. Experience gives us something we didn’t have when we made those earlier plans: better judgment.

And perhaps that is one of the privileges of getting older. We don’t have to keep proving that an old decision was right. We are allowed to make a better decision with what we know now.

Coming home

When I returned to Hawaii this time, everything was familiar. The ocean was still here. The mountains were still here. My usual places were still here.

But I noticed that I was looking at my own life with slightly different eyes. There are things I want to create. There are conversations I want to have. There are ideas I want to explore and projects I want to build.

And there are also things I no longer feel the need to chase simply because they once mattered to me. I don’t have all the answers about what the next few years will look like. I’m actually comfortable with that.

What matters more to me now is continuing to ask the right questions. Because sometimes clarity doesn’t come from planning further ahead. Sometimes it comes from stopping long enough to ask whether the life you once planned is still the life you want today. And sometimes, you have to leave home for a little while to come back with a different question.