The other day, a quiet voice broke through the noise of the day’s tasks. It didn’t arrive with the clamor of a corporate directive. It surfaced the way real things do, slowly, in a gap between one meeting and the next. At 66, you look at the horizon differently. Time has changed its denomination. And yet there I was. Still tethered to the daily machinery of business goals and outcomes. Still trying to earn my badge while simultaneously exiting the gate.
The nudge asked four questions: Why do you work? Are you working because you have to? Do you work to help yourself? How does your work help others? And then the one that made me set down my coffee: Which question are you?
I remember a Hallmark film I’d stumbled upon, Stranded in Paradise. The film centers on a recently fired HR executive who travels to Puerto Rico to salvage her career at a convention, only to be marooned by a hurricane and faces an unexpected reckoning. The real question, buried beneath the romance and palm trees, was disarmingly simple: Are you happy? Or are you employed just to be employed?
Simple questions are the dangerous ones. They don’t require a whiteboard. If we’re honest, and corporate culture rarely rewards honesty, most of us are standing before one of four thresholds. We just stay too busy to notice which one.
I. The Nature of the Flame
Why do you still choose to bring your heat into the crowded marketplace?
We treat continuing to work as inertia dressed up as intention. But there’s an older question underneath: what is actually burning on your hearth right now? Are you arriving each morning with genuine creative engagement — or are you feeding an old habit because you’re afraid of what the room feels like when it goes cold? Not a criticism. It’s a legitimate question.
It’s a question worth sitting with before the 9 a.m. call.
II. The Illusion of the Safe Cage
Are you a true pilgrim here, or are you running in place to outrun the silence?
We tell ourselves we have to work. Necessity is a very comfortable coat. Of course most of us have to work. But the organization, and I say this with full affection for organizations, is also a spectacular hiding place. It provides an unending supply of urgency. Someone always needs something. There is always a fire that will consume you completely, if you let it.
However, there’s a larger, often-ignored meeting. It’s that unscheduled meeting with yourself? The one that waits outside the building, patient and unhurried? That one that gets continuously postponed. Until it can’t. Stephen Jenkinson spent two decades sitting with dying people and noticed something unsettling: most of them had never quite gotten around to that meeting. The corporate treadmill isn’t just a career choice. For many of us, it is a highly sophisticated arrangement for postponing the one conversation that would clarify everything else.
III. The Vanishing Scaffold
If the narrow corridor of your position were torn away, who is left standing?
For decades, we have constructed something magnificent. Our scaffolding is surrounded by titles, governance structures, and authorities that come from being the person who knows where things are. It keeps us upright. It tells us who we are at 6 a.m. But stay inside it long enough and a quieter question begins to echo in the spaces between tasks.
Do I exist if only my work exists?
I ask this not as a thought experiment. Remember the horizon I mentioned at the beginning, I can see it from here. My scaffolding is coming down whether I choose it or not. That changes the question considerably.
This is the great fault line. Western culture, has quietly replaced elderhood with extended adulthood. The ‘extension’ are those who keep accumulating rather than transmitting. They keep building a scaffold rather than becoming wise. They remain permanently in the construction phase, adding another floor when we should be asking who gets the building when we’re gone.
If the laptop is closed for good tomorrow, would you have the nerve to meet a world that doesn’t care about your resume? And more than that: would you know what you were here to pass on?
IV. The Architecture of Belonging
How does your labor become a gift rather than a monologue?
This is the final threshold, and the most demanding one.
True maturity in our labor happens when we stop trying to derive identity from a finite corporate environment and instead recognize what we actually are: participants in something larger, with a particular offering that only we can make, and a limited season in which to make it. Work stops being about self-validation. It becomes an act of belonging. Not just to the organization, not just to this moment, but to the longer human story, the one that existed before the org chart and will continue after the last performance review.
Jenkinson would call this village-mindedness: the understanding that how we show up in our labor, how we carry what we’ve learned, and what we choose to hand forward — these are not personal lifestyle choices. They are obligations we owe to the people who came before, the ones who will come after, and us.
So, Which Question Am I?
I’ve sat with these four thresholds long enough to answer honestly. I am the third one. The Scaffold.
I haven’t resolved this. I’m still inside the construction, still reaching for the title on the door some mornings as though it tells me something essential. The scaffold hasn’t come down. But I feel it loosening. And that feeling, unsettling as it is, might be the most alive I’ve been in years.
I don’t believe the nudge was random. That quiet voice in the gap between meetings, the one most attribute to nothing more than restlessness, was God. There’s a word for the persistent, patient invitation to become more fully yourself before you run out of time to do it. I’ll leave the theology to others. But I know ‘grace’ when I feel it. And I believe I was told, once, to write. So I write.
What I’m learning, slowly and with some urgency now, is that the scaffold was never the problem. It served its purpose. The problem is mistaking it for the building. The daily machinery will always offer distraction. It is very good at this. It has your schedule memorized and your weaknesses cataloged. But the nudge remains.
And here is the challenge I’ll leave with you, not a comfort, but an honest one:
Don’t wait for the hurricane to strand you in paradise before you answer the question.
Which threshold are you standing before and what would it take for you to stop pretending you don’t know?