A man doesn’t usually know the shape of his life while he is living it.
He just follows the tracks laid in front of him. In my youth, I learned this earlier than most. The Amtrak carried me back and forth between my mother and father, two worlds stitched together by a timetable I didn’t create. Watching Indiana pass in long stretches of fields and towns taught me the strange lesson that you can belong in two places and still feel like you’re standing on a platform waiting for a train that never fully arrives.
That back-and-forth built something in me I didn’t understand at the time. The ability to live in motion, to accept that life isn’t one story but a collection of transfers.
As a young man, the tracks led me downtown. Not to forests or mountains, but to a different frontier, the trading floor. My wilderness was a pit surrounded by men who fought with hand signals and shouts. Every day felt like stepping into volatile weather... loud, unpredictable, furious, alive.
I was carving out my place in a world that rewarded grit and punished hesitation. There was a rawness to it, a kind of honest violence where you took your hits, gave a few back, and went home carrying the residue of the day on your skin. The world thought that trading floor looked chaotic. To me, it was the closest thing I ever had to a settlement of my own.
Then just like landscapes disappear when the tracks bend, that world vanished. One day the roar of a thousand voices became the hum of servers and screens. The life I’d built, the identity hammered out in noise and sweat, evaporated, leaving me standing in a quiet that felt almost unreal. That is how life moves ... it doesn’t ask permission when it changes, it just does.
Between all that movement, love showed up and slipped away again. Some people rode a few stops with me and some stayed longer. Some I thought would be there at the end of the line.
A few broke my heart.
A few I broke back.
Most of life is people stepping on and off the train. You don’t realize how rare the stayers are until the seats around you start emptying out. More leave than come. That is the truth most men never say out loud.
The train took me home countless nights, rattling over the city grid. Each streetlight and storefront a reminder that the world doesn’t stop turning just because you don’t know where you are headed. On those rides, I felt the years beginning to stack. Childhood in the rear window, the pit fading into memory, love drifting into distance, the quiet settling in deeper. That is when a man starts hearing the echoes and the things he lost.
The things he should’ve said.
The chances he should’ve taken.
Life haunts you, not out of cruelty, but out of accuracy.
As time thins out and the track ahead grows short, you finally begin to understand your own story. You see that the boy shuttled between parents, the young man trying to earn his place in a pit full of sharks, the father, the husband, the man who kept going even when the world changed under his feet. He was building something the whole time. A life that seemed ordinary from the outside but was miraculous in its endurance.
Most of us don’t find our place until the world has stopped looking at us but finding it late is still finding it.
.... and a life lived fully, with scars, losses, small victories, and all station stops; that is its own kind of miracle.
