When I was in college, I had a professor named Kenmont Hoitsma. He taught both philosophy and comparative religion, but what he really taught was how to think. He was a commanding presence—tall, barrel-chested, with sandy, wavy hair receding from a high hairline—and he had the kind of voice that didn’t just lecture, but challenged. His assignments were deceptively simple: take a passage—a Bible verse, a line from the Bhagavad Gita, a poem by e.e. cummings—and define it with a single word. Then defend that word with a rigorous, reasoned argument. Was the word in the title? Repeated in the text? Central to the conflict? Hidden in metaphor?

This exercise, repeated week after week, forced us to search for coherence—to connect theme, tone, and structure to a core insight. It was an introduction not just to analysis, but to accountability in reasoning. And at the heart of his teaching was a principle I’ve never forgotten: ethics means habit. Not ideals, not aspirations—but the sum of repeated action. “Everyone has ethics,” he’d say, “unless they’re insane. The question is what your habits say you believe.”

Our final project was to define our own lives with one word. I remember wanting to write love, or loyalty, or family. Those were the ideals I imagined I believed in. But when I really examined my actions—my patterns, my default choices—the word I landed on was sensation. It was a hard truth. I realized I had been living for intensity, for stimulation, for whatever satisfied my hunger in the moment.

At the time of writing the final paper for my History of Philosophy course, I examined my actions to determine my values. At that time I still lived at home with my parents and two younger siblings, and I was not a kind and loyal brother, son, or friend. In fact, I realized that I believed in these ideals and yet did not act on those beliefs. This was a turning point. What was I to do? Either change my beliefs or change my actions. I decided I could not imagine a world based upon selfish self-gratification. I immediately began to change my ways and focus my acts and attention on the family and friends around me. My brother and sister especially will tell you that I made a 180 that day. I began to work on our relationships, and to this day, more than 30 years later, we are very close and enjoy a special bond.

This experience taught me that I can change. It taught me to keep my eyes open for opportunities to change and to make a difference. Since then, there have been a few other occasions of radical upheaval. Always, when the crisis comes, I ask myself: Are my actions aligned with the direction I want to go?

1.1 A Life in Books: The Thread of Reason

After that turning point in college, my hunger for understanding only deepened. I’ve been a lifelong reader, and over the years, I’ve built a personal library of more than 500 books. My shelves hold everything from fast-paced thrillers and sweeping fantasy epics to dense philosophical works like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason—easily the most challenging book I own—and Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action, which was recommended to me by my best friend from childhood.

I’ve always been drawn to stories that speak to the human condition. Some of my most beloved books are classics: Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo. I’ve read most of them more than once. A few I’ve returned to a dozen times or more. These aren’t just stories—they’re ethical laboratories, places where values are tested, where choices have weight, and where transformation is always possible.

In recent years, life’s pace has made it harder to sit down and read, but that hasn’t slowed me down. I listen to audiobooks constantly—while driving, working, cleaning—any time I’m not writing or spending time with someone I love. And through all this reading and listening, I began to notice a thread, a pattern, a kind of philosophical consensus that transcended genre, era, and ideology.

The great thinkers and storytellers, in their own voices and styles, kept returning to the same fundamental truth: Life is made of choices, and the choices we make add up to the life we have. Circumstances rise and fall. Opportunities come and go. But in the end, who we are is shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we respond—how we choose, again and again, to act in the face of the world.

1.2 Discovering Jung: The Cadence of the Inward Journey

Later in life, I encountered the writings of Carl Jung. My first attempt was with a series of lectures collected in Modern Man in Search of a Soul. I’ll admit, I didn’t get very far at first. The language was dense, the concepts layered in psychological terminology I didn’t yet understand, and the rhythm of the prose resisted easy absorption. I was used to reading popular psychology—work that, when done well, can be profoundly thought-provoking, but that always keeps a firm hand on the reader’s attention, guiding them along so they’re never left behind.

Jung didn’t do that. He assumed his reader was ready to struggle a little. At the time, I wasn’t. But years later, I came back to Jung, and this time I stayed. Slowly, I began working through his collected writings. At first, I had to read with a dictionary nearby and cross-reference unfamiliar terms, sometimes multiple times. But after a while, his cadence—his way of thinking—began to click. It reminded me of my early experiences with Shakespeare. As a child, I saw Much Ado About Nothing on stage and understood almost none of it; it might as well have been a foreign language. Years later, once I’d learned the rhythm of the dialogue and the structure of the language, I discovered that the play is one of the sharpest and funniest things ever written.

Jung was like that. Once I caught the rhythm, his work opened up door after door of insight and reflection. His concepts—archetypes, the collective unconscious, individuation—weren’t just theoretical. They were maps of human experience, expressed in the language of depth and symbol. But they came with very few road signs. Jung did not offer many practical explanations, or self-help style manuals for integrating his insights into daily life. That part, I realized, was left to us.

This essay is, in part, an answer to that challenge. Its purpose is to offer a practical scaffolding—a structure of values drawn from lived experience and reasoned reflection—that prepares a person for what Jung called the inward journey. That is the time of introspection, of withdrawal from external scripts, wherein the authentic self begins to emerge.

And here’s what I believe: Without mysticism, without recourse to metaphysics or religious authority, it is possible to reason out a mode of being from first principles—a way of life suited to the individual, grounded in clarity, alignment, and ethical coherence. Such a life provides not only peace and meaning, but a rare readiness: the ability to fully grasp the fleeting moments of joy, love, and beauty that visit us all—and that so many of us, tragically, are unprepared to receive.