87“People living deeply,” wrote Anaïs Nin, “have no
fear of death.” I was not living deeply. And it took me a
long time to get clear answers to my question: What
makes me happy? But any question we ask ourselves
often enough will eventually yield the right answer. The
problem is, we quit asking.
Fortunately for me, in this rare instance of persis-
tence in the face of extreme discomfort, I didn’t quit
asking. The answer came to me in the form of a
memory—so colorful it was almost like a movie scene. I
was driving at night in my car 10 years earlier, and I
was as happy as I had ever been. In fact, I was driving
around aimlessly so that I could keep my feeling of hap-
piness preserved and contained within that car—I didn’t
want anything to interrupt it. It was so profound that it
lasted for hours.
The occasion had been a speech I had just given. The
subject of it was my recovery from an addiction, and the
night that I spoke I was running such a high fever, and
I had such a fear of speaking in public that I tried to call
the talk off. My hosts wouldn’t hear of it.
Somehow I made it to the podium and, probably be-
cause my fever and flu were so intense, I spoke freely,
without caution or self-consciousness. The more I spoke
about freedom from addiction, the more excited I got.
My creativity just soared. I remember the audience
laughing as I spoke. I remember them jumping to their
feet and cheering when I was finished. It was the most
remarkable night of my life. Somehow I had reached
people in a way I’d never reached people before, and
their own expressions of joy lifted me higher than I had
ever been.
It was that memory of that moonlit night, driving in
my car, that came back to me 10 years later after I’d
Find your soul purpose