Candid Conversations Newsletter: The Space Between Becoming and Transcendence (An Existential Reflection)

This was the first trip I took after choosing to step more intentionally into self-sovereignty, instead of staying locked in the autopilot survival mode I had relied on. I drove to one of my favorite cities, a place I once called home. Yet the city had shifted. Landmarks were gone, friends had moved, and I found myself in a landscape both familiar and strange. That distance carried with it a quiet emptiness.

Thankfully, I was meeting my friend Chris. We had connected years earlier through work and bonded over food and drink. That day it was brunch in the Plateau, at a modern Indian restaurant.

The food was unforgettable. Eggs Benedict layered with unexpected flavors, cocktails infused with herbs and spices that made sense only after tasting them. But what stayed with me was not the meal. It was the conversation.

I admitted I felt stuck in my career. I was doing work that mattered, but often for the wrong people. I was caught between ambition and politics, value and profit. My purpose felt detoured. Chris admitted he was in the same tension. We laughed when we both named it at once: existential crisis. We said it in humor, but the words lingered in me.

In truth, it was not a crisis. It was misalignment. The feeling of walking up a down escalator: always moving, always striving, but never arriving.

Anchors and Crossroads🛣️⚓

In that season I was also reading Nietzsche. His writing, paradoxically, deepened my faith in the Cross. To me it became a symbol of balance, the horizontal line of material life intersecting with the vertical line of spirit.

Purpose, I have come to believe, cannot come only from within. It requires a connection beyond us, something eternal. My identity is shaped by experience, but my faith rests in the great “I Am.”

Existentialists remind us that meaning is not given but made. Nietzsche pressed this further with his vision of the Übermensch (The Superman), one who redefines values and creates meaning from struggle. Carl Rogers, from a psychological lens, spoke of something similar through his idea of congruence: the alignment of inner truth and outer life. Nietzsche points to transcendence through creation. Rogers points to wholeness through authenticity. Both remind us that becoming fully alive requires courage, responsibility, and a willingness to confront the gap between what is and what might yet be.

For me, these perspectives do not compete but converge. The Cross, the Übermensch, Rogers’ congruence, all point toward the same movement: drawing nearer to Source.

Nietzsche called this becoming. Rogers called it self-actualization. I see it as the meeting place of the horizontal and the vertical.

I return to the Source. There, agency takes root. There, resilience endures.

Incongruence 🎲

Incongruence is the fracture between the inner and outer self. It is saying yes when we mean no. It is striving for recognition while hungering for meaning. It is chasing success that betrays our values. Incongruence feels heavy, a negotiation we cannot win. It leaves us divided and dependent on external approval. In that state, agency shrinks to survival.

Congruence 🌉

Congruence, by contrast, is honesty. It is the closing of the gap between what we believe and how we live. The energy once spent performing becomes energy for creating. Choices gather us instead of scattering us. Agency expands because it is whole.

Resilience follows. Not just grit to endure, but strength born of coherence. Setbacks wound but do not fracture, because they no longer divide us against ourselves. To live congruently is to live anchored, even when circumstances shift.

Widening the Frame 🎞️

When was the last time you walked barefoot on the grass, pausing at the base of a tree that has stood for a hundred years? Nature humbles us. It reminds us that however much we know, it will never be everything.

When I left the sixth grade, we were asked to recite The Desiderata. I still return to it. One line continues to stand out: “Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And with that right, I choose to live as my truest self. Evolving, adapting, and most of all, becoming.

The journey is not to escape what we are, nor to pretend we have already arrived. It is to live in that space between what is and what might yet be.

The work is not only to ask “Who am I?” but to stay with the harder question:

Who am I becoming?