The first day of my summer class my professor asked, “What motivates people?”

The answers from classmates varied: money, social obligations, goals, success. Answers you’d expect, except I felt like the most important reason hadn’t been said.

My professor pressed further, “ What else?”

“ It has to be personal. There’s a bigger reason — a higher purpose.”

“Bingo,” he said. Then he asked, “Why did you say that?”

I explained, “You can only make so much money, and then what? You hit a goal then you set another one. What keeps you going beyond that? It has to be emotional. It has to mean something.”

His question stuck with me after class. I found myself thinking about it while I was on a run. I realized once we understand our why, we stop obsessing so much over the “when” and the “how.”

When our reason is emotionally tied to us, the “how” comes. naturally. We enjoy the journey as much as the end goal — anxiety around timelines diminishes.

When it comes to my own life and my “why” in running the best races aren’t just about speed or distance. They’re the ones tied to a cause that matters to me. In those races, I not only push myself harder, but the training itself feels different — more exciting, more meaningful.

I’ve also been blessed with people in my life who have led example, they don’t just show up when it’s easy or convenient. They show up because they truly want to and that has changed the way I see things. It’s made me want to show up differently too.

Because when people show up in spite of circumstances, it just hits our hearts differently. Whether it’s running a race for charity, working on a project or toward a goal, it’s obvious when it means something.

Maybe that’s the best answer to what motivates us, when it comes from the heart we just glow differently, and that what sustains us to keep going.

The Heart Behind What Drives Us was originally published in Story Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Okay, this time let’s do single-leg hops over the hurdle,” my physical therapist said, demonstrating an effortless one-footed jump.

I held my breath. Logically, I knew this was why I was here: to strengthen the imbalances. But a part of me, mostly my pride, hated looking weak or foolish, especially with an audience.

I told my left side to move. It didn’t. It stayed planted, stubborn and heavy. I would’ve loved to blame fear alone, but this is simply how my left side behaves sometimes, especially when I’m tired. I let out a long breath.

Sensing my frustration, my PT offered, “Let’s start with some hops on the floor.”

“A lot of little steps,” I said, forcing a quick smile.

After a string of tiny hops, something clicked. My body and nervous system woke up. I hopped over the 12-inch hurdle. Was it pretty? No. Did I make it? Yes.

I was still embarrassed by my left side lagging a bit, but I kept at it. The jumps got tighter, cleaner. My mind and my body slowly synced.

It wasn’t until later that night, standing beside my friend Madison at a concert, that I finally gave myself some credit. A couple years earlier, I had pretty much given up on concerts or anything that required standing in one place. My body simply couldn’t do it.

Between recovering from a car accident and then surgery, I had lost so much strength. Standing for any length of time sent my back into spasm, so I adapted: cycling instead of standing, sitting when I needed a break. I got creative to work around what my body needed.

Eventually, I realized I had to address the root of the issue. But that realization shook my confidence. I expected to return to who I was before — not to start over. Yet starting from the ground up was the only way forward.

The process was slow. I kept it very private. And because it was only mine to witness, it was easy to dismiss any progress I made.

It’s always so much easier to see change in other people than in ourselves. We live with ourselves 24/7, so the small wins blur into the background. We forget to celebrate them, even though those quiet, ordinary wins are the ones that accumulate into the big shifts.

It’s only when we look back over months or years that we realize how far we’ve come.

Whether you’re facing a fear, doing something differently than you would have in the past, or simply choosing to show up again, sometimes the real work is recognizing that we can feel uncomfortable and unsure in our minds while still moving forward with our feet and our hearts.

And that, in the long run, makes all the difference.

We Only See Progress in Hindsight was originally published in Story Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday one second, I was running. The next, I was face-first in the dirt.
My body flew forward like I was sliding into home base.

Tears stung my eyes as pain radiated through my knee and hand. I sat up slowly, brushing off dirt and pine needles.

Blood was pouring down from my knee. My hand that I used to try to catch myself was swelling, but I was in one piece.

My breathing quickened. Stop. I told myself. You’re okay. Breathe.
I closed my eyes and inhaled deeply, knowing that finding my breath was all I needed to do.

Something felt off. I realized my music had stopped. I reached for my phone, still tucked in my running belt. I felt something sharp and realized it was glass. My phone was shattered the back dented in.

The trail map I had downloaded. Gone. No access to the outside world.

For a moment, panic crept in. I would miss calls and texts. Then a sharp truth hit. No one even knew I was here. And since this was my first time in these woods I didn’t know how to get out.

Reframe it, I told myself. I could walk. I was in one piece. And maybe… this was the whole point.

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been learning how to trust myself more. How to stop overthinking and just move. Maybe what was happening today wasn’t an accident. Maybe it was helping me see how much I’ve grown to trust my instinct. A way to help me remember that I already know how to navigate the unknown.

So I kept walking.

I saw a trail post but instead of it containing a map behind the class it was a QR code to scan for a map.

I let out a laugh.

I stuck to the path I was on, starting to learn the terrain, side stepping rocks and roots that could potentially trip me up. The way that fear, worry and doubt often do in life when we are faced with something challenging that we haven’t navigated before.

I devised a plan if I encountered a fork in the woods, I would explore one way and leave a pile of rocks along the way to mark that I had been there.

Eventually, a fork in the trail appeared. I chose to take a right and soon saw the brick water house I’d passed at the beginning. Its bright blue graffiti caught my eye. I could hear the echo of traffic in the distance and remembered when I parked I could hear cars cruising down the highway through the trees.

The truth is, most of us are walking paths we’ve never traveled before in our careers, our lives, in our healing. And it’s easy to think we’re lost just because the way ahead isn’t clearly mapped or marked.

But not all guidance comes from the outside world. The best guidance comes from that quiet voice within, not what the outside world tells us, or expects us to do. We are the only ones living our individual life experiences.

So if the path you’re on feels uncertain… keep going anyway. Trust where your feet are taking you. Trust the turn that feels right, even if it doesn’t “make sense.”
And let the quiet voice within be louder than the world outside.

You might just realize you’ve known the way all along.

What A Broken Phone In The Woods Taught Me About Trust was originally published in Story Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I stood at the edge of the high dive, staring down at the serene pool below. It was my last day of swim certification at the YMCA — my final chance to take the leap. Only a handful of my classmates had opted to do it. It wasn’t required. Just an option.

Even at ten years old, I wasn’t the type to shy away from a challenge.
But standing at the very edge of the board, the pool suddenly looked unfamiliar. I’m not sure if it was the height that made my heart race, or if it was the creeping doubt that all the practice I’d put in — the easy strokes, the simple laps — hadn’t truly prepared me for this.

I nearly convinced myself I didn’t belong up there. That I hadn’t earned this. I turned around and started to climb back down the ladder. But it felt wrong.

I paused halfway down. My swim coach was shouting something, but I couldn’t hear him. I reminded myself this was my choice — and I had already made it earlier in the day, before fear crept in.

I climbed back up. Walked to the edge. And jumped.

My body broke the surface. Water shot up my nose, and I was momentarily disoriented. But then, instinct kicked in. I swam to the surface and, strokes later, pulled myself to the side of the pool.

To my surprise, my instructor was there, offering a hand to help me out. At first, I shrank away, still feeling insecure about the moment I’d nearly backed down. But then I realized — he wasn’t judging me. He was just offering support.

Even though the choice to jump was mine alone, I wasn’t alone in the experience. I just had to be open to receiving help.

When I looked back up at the high dive, it no longer seemed so intimidating.

That day, I was proud of myself for jumping. But it also reminded me of something deeper: I’m the kind of person who likes to wade into the ocean — or a pool — letting my body adjust slowly to the temperature, the waves, the depth. That’s how I’ve approached most things in life.

Except for the times I’ve let fear take the wheel.

In those moments, I’ve tried to force big leaps — not from courage, but from a need to control the outcome. Because uncertainty felt unbearable. Spoiler alert: that never works.

It wasn’t until years later that I fully understood the lesson from that day thirty-one years ago. Sometimes life forces us to jump before we feel ready.
When the unexpected happens, we may not have a choice. We leap. And we trust that the practice — the life we’ve lived, the lessons we’ve gathered — will carry us back to the surface.

The leap itself is brief. The real work is in swimming through the waves, treading water until it calms, finding our rhythm in unfamiliar depths.

But we do it.

Because everything we’ve practiced, everything we’ve built inside ourselves, is still there — waiting to rise when we need it most.

And while part of the work is ours to do, it’s also important to trust those offering help are placed on our paths for a reason, and accepting their outstretched hand is part of the plan.

We might just be surprised by who’s there to lift us up after the deep dive.

Where Courage Meets Kindness: Lessons from the High dive was originally published in Story Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Yesterday evening, the sky put up a grand show of colours. The hills were a stark black against the backdrop of brilliant orange. The clouds echoed hues of coral and lavender that faded into a stormy blue overhead.

When I pondered in the pages of my diary later, a thought wandered in and lingered. How important colour is in our lives, I wondered, and laughed when I remembered how I once thought the world was greyscale. I guess most children have had the idea that everything was black and white before coloured cinema came into existence.

Childhood is probably the most colourful part of our lives. Everything in the world through a child’s eyes is beautiful. We as humans probably intrinsically know beauty and love, and can recognise them in their purest forms before standards start to creep in with age. Children are the greatest artists we’ve ever known, because there are no limits to their imagination, no ceiling to their dreams.

At some point in our lives, each of us try to regain the innocence of our inner children. We try to enjoy the things we used to love as a child, take a day off from everything and just paint those two mountains and a river and a sun with a sloppy smile. We sit and flip through old photo albums, where our smiles are frozen in time, happier than we have probably ever been or will be. We see a Kinder Joy on a medical store shelf and buy it on an impulse, but it isn’t as sweet as you remember it to be, for some reason.

But there are times when our inner children peek out without us trying to. At such times, we see love everywhere, in a tiny pebble on the road, in a pretty flower, in goofy smiles. For a while, we accept that love was never grand. Maybe love is in the little things, in the simple things. Love is in a leaf, in a swaying tree, in a playful breeze, and in a flower. Maybe love is in a cloud.

Love is in the way the world reflects in my cat’s eyes, diminished so that the sky outside the window through which she chatters at the birds looks double as vast.

Love is an old house in a quiet, canopy-covered lane, a faded black umbrella hung on a nail outside the door — the silent nameplate of an old man. Maybe his wife puts it there because she knows he forgets, or maybe it is just a reminder of the unpredictability of summer rain. Either way, it is an understanding, an acknowledgement, and what is that if not a form of love?

Love is stopping at a signal and noticing a tree round the corner, the way a quiet afternoon breeze plays down the busy road, and the old leaves gleam like rose gold sparkles in the sunshine as they float away with the current of the wind. The wind dies after a few minutes but the simple moment remains.

Love is a cornflower blue sky, its tapestry woven in the space between the overlapping of the branches overhead. Love is the sea, and the mountains, and the grass, and the ladybugs that scuttle around in it.

Maybe love is in the art of noticing. All the artists do it, and what is art if not love in its many forms? Maybe noticing the art around is is what makes us able to produce art. If deriving happiness from the little things wasn’t what made us artists, most of the great names we know wouldn’t have existed at all.

There is immense profoundness in poems about daffodils, and snow and crows, and red wheelbarrows, and in paintings of ponds and sunflowers. Well-loved art has never been grand, and perhaps that is the beauty of it.

The Art of Noticing was originally published in Story Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There was a series of explosions in Nyanya.

Her foot was inside the house as soon as the front door opened. Bag laid to rest on the dining table, and shoes kicked off as her body connects with the sofa. There is a bottle in her hand.

Habitual instinct — I paint the picture for the others in the house. It takes a few minutes, but they gather in the parlour. Perfect timing for her, she’s sat up to them like she called a meeting.

“Did you hear the explosions?”

The green bottle of dry gin comes to the table. I know to bring the shot glasses. I hear their voices from the kitchen. A tanker carrying about eight cylinders of gas bumped into a car, offsetting the balance the older cylinders had been tugging from however far under the hot sun.

I wonder if it’s speculation. No news has come of it yet. There must have been talk on the road — you know, the average Nigerian is an expert on many matters.

It was around closing time. The roads were packed — cars, buses, people hopping on and off. A junction. She had just gotten out of a car, a little up the road from where it happened. People who weren’t affected kept moving — some trying to drive past, others reversing in panic.

All eight cylinders went off.

The first thing she did after the ordeal was request a cold bottle of beer from a kiosk seller under an umbrella — to feel okay again, she said.

This is the second time there has been an explosion in Nyanya. They say it begs the question of whether there are spirits in the ground to be appeased.

I count that I have enough glasses when I return, and burrow into a chair to hear the rest of it. My aunty takes the bottle in her hand and opens it. She pauses with a distant stare, “There was a man they managed to pull out of a burning car. He kept saying that his wife is in the car. If she was, she was long gone.”

“How do you know?” I ask

“There was no scream.”

She begins pouring into the glasses. “When there has been an accident and we make it out whole and okay, we open a bottle and thank God. And even if the accident was ghastly, the car tumbles and crashes, even if we land in the hospital,” she’s smiling now as she looks about our faces, “we open a bottle and thank God.”

A series of explosions in Nyanya area was originally published in Story Saturday on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.