SEVEN YEARS AGO, I took my sons Henry and Patrick to South Africa to check out some new charitable project requests for the Utopia Foundation and to review some projects we were already supporting. Utopia’s mission is to create a world where every person goes to bed feeling safe, fed, happy, and optimistic about tomorrow.

LAST WEEK I PICKED UP STEVE KIESLING (who had been my editor at Spirituality & Health for 20 years before the publication merged with Unity Magazine) at the airport a few miles from my home in Gqeberha, South Africa. On the way to his B&B, I outlined the fun things I had choreographed for our two and a half days together: going to Addo Elephant Park, a long hike up the coast, a trip to the penguin sanctuary, and joining my family on some scouting activities at the beach.

LAST WEEK, I WAS ESPECIALLY GLAD we had our four-wheel-drive van jacked up four inches and fitted with steel plates under the chassis to protect the gas tank. Why? Because the “roads” shown on the GPS in this corner of South Africa turned out to be gravel paths with large rocks and ditches, as well as goats, sheep, and people to navigate around. The GPS signal also got so weak, I wasn’t sure we would get where we were supposed to go.

TWO BOOKS SIT ON MY BOOKSHELF: One is titled Living Without a Goal. The other champions living with a goal. Both books have meaning in my life. Obsessing over goals often messes up relationships and means not smelling the roses or not being open to new experiences (unless that is your goal). But living without a goal—following the butterflies of our muses from flower to flower—also messes up relationships and leaves us going nowhere to look back from.

WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, I wrote a poem titled “Why Is This” that ended with the question, Why is this? The poem was just another assignment in English class, but I still remember it because for the rest of the year whenever my English teacher would make a point, he would smile and look at me until I squirmed and then ask the class, “Why is this?” It spread like a pandemic. Soon friends (and then some) ended conversations with me by loudly asking, “Why is this?” Emotions help us remember.

“AND SEAL THE DOOR WHERE EVIL DWELLS.” This line from Alice Bailey’s Great Invocation of 1945 came to mind as I walked around the twisted steel and rubble at Ground Zero of where the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, also in 1945. The bomb missed its intended target of a bridge and hit a hospital a few hundred meters away. The line came to mind again in Okinawa, where a quarter of the civilians were killed not only by the allied war efforts but by the Japanese military that needed their resources.