Setting out on a journey bigger than yourself, or a quest to define yourself; to find the truth for you, whatever that may be.  We may not be planning to go out and walk around the woods, but we can relate to the conflict between our desires to experience a certain quest or a certain opportunity to hear and listen.  Gideon Lewis-Kraus, author of, A Sense of Direction:  Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, joins the show today to share his own experiences with the life-changing adventure.

The greatest barrier to embarking on a life-changing journey is that people do not have the financial resources, the time availability, or the ability to do quests like this.  They allow themselves to be constrained and, typically, wait for something to force them into a moment of change.

“Many of the people who embark on a journey do it at a time of perceived crisis in their life,” Lewis-Kraus explained.  “It’s really just about the time and finding a way to free yourself from the obligations in your life.”

Once you are able to embrace the challenge of a journey like this, what is the most valuable thing that lives out there in the world that is a detachment from whatever you may know in your day-to-day life?

“The sense that you are doing something every day that you are choosing to do,” Lewis-Kraus replied.  “At a certain point you can’t complain because you are doing something that you want to do.  The idea of waking up every day with a strong, if not arbitrary, sense of direction every day to your life was the greatest rush for me.  You almost get addicted to the adventure.”

There is a freedom from the seemingly endless number of decisions and choices we have as a society to make on a regular basis.  So many pilgrimages end with this exhilarating moment but then no one discusses the return to normal life.  Does it become a quest or does it become an invasion on your ability to live in the regular world?

“People need to be aware that you have more choices in your life than you ever think that you do,” Lewis-Kraus continued.  “It was as close to a total freedom from economic constraints that I had ever experienced when I lived in Berlin.  It is something that people will have to

As we launch into the summer of mission analysis, we believe that this is the perfect time to embark on our own journey of a lifetime.

For the full interview: