Recently, I was contemplating why I wanted to put my thoughts on the internet to be considered, interpreted, and even judged by strangers.
Actually, if I am being honest, I have been contemplating more than just that. I’ve been circling around that age-old question: What am I even doing here? What are my strengths? How do can I make them align with my passions? And how can I use them to make the world a bit more whole?
I have been more and more drawn to the idea of being a guide. Not a teacher - mostly because what do I know about this big, crazy, beautiful world anyway? But I do want to help others by sharing my experiences. For either sparks of inspiration or massive lessons learned with bright, flashing U-turn signs. I don’t know how to walk your path, but I am getting pretty good at walking mine. And yet, I have realized it is still incredibly important to share the journey. Sometimes knowing someone else has wandered, questioned, stumbled, and kept going is enough to help another person feel less alone as they carve their own way forward.
This is a journal entry of mine. Welcome to my inner world on this topic.
November 26, 2025
For those of us who are meant to be guides by walking the path and inviting others to join… well this is a reminder for you.
It is incredibly important for everyone (guide or not) to take careful note of their lessons learned on their wandering and curving paths. That way they can look back and remember with love and grace, like sunshine warming a childhood memory. Or so they can do pattern recognition (something us humans are particularly good at) so they can continue moving forward instead of getting stuck in a loop, making the same mistakes.
But for us guides, this serves a double purpose. It is as important for us to remember this for ourselves as it is to remember how to shepherd the next generation. You see, our role is to make the mistakes. To collect skinned knees and bruised shins and blistered fingers and toes. To gather dozens of stories of getting lost in the woods or falling into the river or whatever other adventures can be told around the campfire. It is so important for us to be able to pass these stories – and more importantly, these lessons – along to those who walk the path after us.
But that’s only part of it. We also have to take careful note of how we learned each lesson. What logic jumps we made when calculating our next step and how we slowly learned to recognize patterns (both good and bad) that shaped our intuitive compass, built from a seemingly unsearchable database of knowledge. Where were the lows when we wanted to lay down and die and what were the magical words that touched our hearts to help us rise again. It is critical to note how it all felt: how the air around us settled into our lungs, how the sunlight brushed our skin, and every other small detail of the landscape around us, both inside and outside of us.
Because when guiding others… you have to remember that part of the path. You can’t shout down at them from the top of the mountain, telling them to “just keep going!” They need someone to understand exactly how that moment feels. In fact, the best thing you can do is a bit of time traveling. To that younger version of you. The one who was still learning, stumbling along the way. So that you might walk the path alongside them as a friend. Remembering where you came from keeps you humble and keeps them from walking alone. So, us guides must take in every detail of our journey so that we might be able to transport ourselves back along every curve of the path. To help others find their way as well.
This is for those who are on the path. For those who walk ahead of me, those who walk beside me, and for those walking behind me.
And as a reminder, one of my favorite sayings…
Not all who wander are lost
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Where It Came From
This is a lesson I learned surprisingly young. If I haven’t mentioned it to you by now, I grew up with Martial Arts. I have been teaching adults since I was around eleven years old. There were many lessons from that chapter that shaped me, but one of the most subtle (and the one that has quietly followed me into adulthood) was learning how to teach. In my teenage years, my teachers (the ones who were teaching me how to teach) made very clear to me one thing:
In order to be a good teacher, you had to understand your student.
That meant remembering what it felt like to be a white belt again — eager, perhaps a little scared, and trying desperately to figure out how to coordinate your limbs into something that resembled grace. It meant remembering what it felt like to be a green belt again — more power than before, but still so much to learn you didn’t even know what you didn’t know. And it meant remembering what it was to be a red belt again – with the skill and growing confidence and the important lesson to not get a big head! And so on.
So I started paying attention. I watched how my teachers taught. I noticed how it felt in my own body when something finally clicked — the moment a kick landed just right or a combination flowed out of me without thought. That awareness deepened my practice, but it also made me a better teacher.
Upon reflection, I’m grateful I learned this so young. By my teenage years, I had already begun to study not just what I was learning, but how I was learning it. And now I see that I’ve brought that same curiosity into every corner of my life.
In dance, I have a very similar, almost one-for-one, experience in understanding how I am being taught and how it feels in my body. So much so that it is almost second nature. But I also noticed I was doing it in my engineering career too. I have been trying to understand my journey from the other side so that engineers who come after me may learn my lessons far sooner than me. And (hopefully) with less frustration.
It’s fascinating to see how this early martial arts lesson of learning to guide by remembering what it feels like to learn continues to shape how I build my future. Learning this early allowed me to grow into adulthood already trained to observe, to pay attention, to leave myself markers on the trail. I didn’t have to look back decades later and guess at who I was or how something felt relying on hindsight blurred by the wisdom of experience.
This early lesson — remembering what it feels like to learn — stuck with me more than I realized. I do it to help me prepare to be a guide for others. But I also do it to help guide myself on this winding path. Because guides aren’t born at the summit, they’re made along the trail.
And I intend to remember every step.