Dead Reckoning

2025 was one of the darkest years of my life. Two women I called Mom were already gone by then. One took her own life over years, in a slow, quiet way that finally caught up with her. The other raised me like her own and died fighting cancer, and I couldn't be there at the end. I hadn't let myself grieve either one. I just kept moving, because moving is what I have always known how to do. Then my marriage started coming apart, and I found out how far a person can drift without ever noticing the wind.

No satellites. No fixed point overhead telling you where you stood. Just your last known position, your speed, your heading, the hours you'd traveled, plotted forward into an estimate of where you now were.

It worked. Until it didn't.

Wind moves a ship. Current moves it. The steering is never perfect, the speed never quite what you logged. None of these errors are large on their own. In spaceflight, a fraction of a degree wrong in a single calculation, uncorrected over enough distance, can miss a target by thousands of miles. A ship works the same way, quietly, mile by mile, while the sailor holds his heading and trusts it.

And that's what happened to me. Not with a ship. With a life.

Husband. Father. Someone who served. Someone who barely had a relationship with God, but still tried to live like it meant something. That was my fix, my last known position, the coordinate everything else got plotted from.

Then grief I hadn't processed did what unprocessed grief does. It moved underneath everything else, disconnecting me from who I was, from the world, from how the world met me back. Moral injury also took root in that gap. By the time my marriage started to break, I was already navigating from an old position without knowing it.

That was the first choice I made that wasn't prudent. Not because reaching was wrong, but because of who I reached toward. I assumed the people I turned to saw me as a man trying to hold his life together. What I found instead was a system.

I was a case, a problem to contain, not a person to help.

For a long time I thought I was good in a crisis because I was a good problem solver, quick, decisive, always moving toward an answer. 2025 taught me otherwise. I wasn't solving problems. I was seeing opportunity, in almost anything, even in wreckage, and mistaking the speed of that for solid ground. Other voices followed, people I would never have taken advice from a year earlier, each one certain they knew my heading better than I did.

No one gets to choose whether hard things happen to them. I say this to my kids often enough that it stopped sounding like advice and started sounding like fact: yes, but you get to decide how to respond.

A prudent choice builds ground you can trust. An imprudent one doesn't, and the drift starts compounding before you ever notice it. One decision on bad ground drifts. One decision on solid ground steers. The math doesn't change. Only the ground does. Capability didn't protect me from that. It accelerated it, and the more horsepower a person is carrying, the further off course a missing foundation can take them before they ever notice.

I was still trying to be a father. Still trying to serve. And underneath both, still grieving two women I hadn't buried right in my own heart, because I hadn't had the room to. Money went. Defensiveness came easy. Worst of all, I couldn't get to the kind of private counsel that actually would have helped in that moment.

It was the people who didn't try to take the wheel. Friends who sat with me instead of directing me. Faith that didn’t ask me to explain myself first. A few people, the kind I hold real respect for now, who showed up steady when steady was the only thing that could have reached me.

Some of what I had been doing during that season was performing. I was good at looking like a man who had it together. Saying the right things, showing up the way I thought I was supposed to. But I had never really asked God to change what was underneath it. Somewhere in those months, I stopped managing how my life looked and started asking Him to do something with what was actually there.

A friend reminded me of a strange contradiction in how people think about time. They imagine going back to change one small thing, certain it would alter everything that followed. The same people won't make one small change today for the same reason. I had been living inside that contradiction for months before I recognized it.

A few months into 2025, something in me said enough, more like shouted from the void. I stopped letting other people's read on my position stand in for my own, and took back the helm.

Did I have it all figured out? No. I still don't. But I finally understood that no one adrift alongside me, however loud, could plot my next heading for me.

Bearing is where you're headed.
Position is where you actually are.

You can hold a perfect bearing your whole life and still not know your position, especially if you're highly capable, especially if you're moving fast, because speed doesn't protect you from drift. It hides it better.

This is who I'm writing to now. You, if you're extraordinarily capable, and you can't quite name when you became disconnected, from yourself, from the people you love, or from the life you actually wanted, because somewhere along the way, the gift took the helm.

That’s what these letters are for. A few years ago, on a multi-day backpacking trip, I passed this warning sign pictured above bolted to a post. Stay on trail. Rocks are extremely slippery. Thirty people have died venturing off the trail.

People still climbed out on the rocks anyway.

The sign couldn’t stop them. It couldn’t make the decision for them. But no one could say the danger had gone unmarked.

That's what I hope these Waymarkers can be. Not a barrier. Not a guarantee. Just something small, left along the path, in case it marks where the danger is, helps you recognize where you are, or shows you how one person found his way back.

Until the next Waymarker,
— Will

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