The familiar weight was immediate, settling on my shoulders the moment I got in the rental car at LAX. Thirty years had passed since I last lived near the California coast, but the internal pressure of duty and obligation was right where I left it. The drive north to Santa Barbara, which should have been scenic, was instead a tense, frustrating negotiation of slow traffic and washed-out roads. Worse, I was driving straight into a blinding, fiery sunset—the light, far from being the clarifying beauty of my memory, was intense, overwhelming, and actively hostile, making my task of providing safe passage difficult and stressful.
It wasn’t until the next morning that the light shifted from antagonistic pressure to peaceful clarity. We woke early and stepped out onto the little balcony of our rented apartment in the hills above town. The chaos of the freeway was gone. The air was cool and still. We watched the sun rise over the Pacific, and the light that spilled onto the hills and the water was soft, a gentle wash of pink and purple. The only sounds were the quiet chirping of birds and the electric whir of hummingbirds everywhere. This therapeutic morning provided a necessary reprieve, but it wasn’t the light I remembered.
That would come later in the day, waiting patiently on the twisty paths of my youth.
I wanted to retrace as many of my old steps as I could on this trip. We were walking through Goleta Beach Park, along the shore where we used to bring our young son to play. I paused. I noticed the bike path I rode daily to the university. It passed through it, curving along the coast. I took out my phone, to capture that gentle, familiar curve of the road I had traveled hundreds of times. The stress of the previous night’s drive was muted, but I was still searching for something.
Then the sunlight hit me. It was not soft or purple; it was that brilliant, pure white light, washing out all the shadows and bleaching the asphalt to a near-perfect silver. For one single, suspended moment, my mind was quiet. I wasn’t an exhausted traveler taking a picture; I was back on the path, steeped in a peace that felt familiar. I was suddenly, profoundly, back home.
The brilliant light reflecting off the Pacific, twinkling like scattered diamonds, stretched across the vastness of the ocean to my left, perfectly counterbalancing the familiar, soft outline of the hills to my right. They formed a pathway for me to travel. I remembered how the ride itself was effortless, a glide. I overcame the occasional obstacle with ease and grace. Flat tire? I would pull over and change it. I could get through anything. The commitment—that core duty and obligation to my young family—sat easily in my chest then, a source of grounding, not a weight. In that brilliant light, there was no room for complexity. The light simply illuminated the simple, achievable truth of a life that felt perfectly in balance.
I lowered my phone from the twisty bike path, blinking away the white brilliance that had pulled me across three decades. The obsession—that insistent, nagging weight that I still carry with me—did not vanish, but it softened. The light hadn’t changed, but my perception of my life had. The truth hit with the clarity of that brilliant sun: the younger me, gliding through the 90s, accomplished the simple, enormous goal he set out to achieve. The primary duty was complete.
The light itself remained pure, ready to shine on any new endeavor. I have come a long way towards leaving my old life behind. The next journey, I realized, wouldn’t be about obligation to others, but about the duty to myself.