Ten years. A decade tethered to a desk, my view framed by the static hum of fluorescent lights rather than the boundless sky. I had become an expert at quieting the persistent itch for something ‘more’ — a skill as much a triumph as a tragedy. But it was within the ancient, hallowed halls of Carlsbad Caverns that the silence I had mastered spoke to me.

It was a pilgrimage meant to escape the mundane, to celebrate a milestone at a job that had long ceased to resonate with my spirit. The caverns, I was told, held the kind of quiet that made you hear your own heartbeat, the kind that humbled human achievements next to its timeless grandeur. Yet, I found more than silence in the echoing chambers; I found a voice — my voice, suppressed, waiting, like the caves, to be explored.

Beneath the earth’s surface, in the cooling shadow of the Big Room, the subterranean world held a mirror to my stagnation. Stalactites and stalagmites, in their slow, persistent dance of growth, reminded me of dreams deferred, of a life meant for change and evolution. I stood there, a witness to millennia, as the weight of my own inertia pressed upon me.

I wandered through the ‘Hall of the White Giant’, its vastness dwarfing my figure, diminishing the decade spent in comfort’s deceptive embrace. Each formation whispered of time’s passage, of the beauty in the slow carve of existence. What had I carved of my own life? The thought was a drumbeat, urging me onward.

It was in the ‘Crystal Spring Dome’, amid reflections and the pure music of dripping water, that the decision crystallized. My journey, much like the water that once flowed through these limestone corridors, needed to carve new paths, to break free from the predictable patterns I had settled into.

So I emerged from the caves, reborn. The sun’s rays felt different on my face, like a spotlight on the stage of a new play, my play. The expanse of the desert around me no longer seemed vast and empty, but inviting and full of potential.

I resigned, a word too often fraught with finality, but for me, it was a beginning. I traded deadlines for timelessness, colleagues for fellow wanderers, and a well-worn path for the uncharted. My world travels became a series of caves, each country a different chamber of wisdom to explore, each culture a mineral-rich formation shaping my perspective.

The caves taught me that wisdom doesn’t always shout; often, it whispers in the depths of our experiences, waiting to be acknowledged. Carlsbad Caverns was not merely a destination but a departure point from which I launched into a world as wide and wondrous as the ‘Big Room’ itself, where the echoes of my footsteps are the sounds of a life in motion, a heart exploring, a soul expanding.

And so I write to you, not as one who has found all the answers but as one who has learned to listen to the questions, to the quiet, to the wisdom that lies in the depths, beneath the surfaces we traverse daily. The caves are more than a marvel of nature; they are a metaphor for the undiscovered chambers within us all, urging us to delve deeper, to find the hidden streams that will carve out the life we are meant to live — a journey as beautiful and varied as the intricate formations beneath the earth.

Join me, not just in traversing the globe, but in the exploration of self, for the greatest journeys are those that take us inward, to the heart of who we are and who we might yet become.