In 2022, I got a small tattoo on my forearm: “utility”.
Written in eight different languages, wrapped like a band across my skin.
At the time, it felt like I had finally answered the question that had followed me quietly, stubbornly, insistently through every version of myself:
What is the purpose of a life?
Utility.
To keep it alive.
It seemed so clear back then.
Clean.
Exact.
Like I had reduced something impossibly large
into a single, honest equation I could carry with me.
The system beneath the word
I didn’t realize what I had really done.
Because utility isn’t a spiritual word.
It isn’t a personal word.
It isn’t a word about identity.
Utility is a systems word.
Every system has a defined utility —
the one purpose that gives it coherence, structure, direction.
Without it, the system dissolves.
When the utility shifts, the system drifts.
When the utility gets rewritten toward extraction,
the system begins feeding on the very life it was created to protect.
My own body showed me drift
Long before I had language for drift,
my body had lived it.
A glioma is just a biological system that forgets its utility.
Cells meant to keep life alive
drift into keeping themselves alive.
That’s all cancer is:
a system quietly reassigning its purpose.
And like any utility service — plumbing, power grids, sewer lines —
you only notice it when it starts to fail.
No one thinks about the quiet utility functions of the brain
until one of them misfires, or swells, or presses against something it shouldn’t.
It’s dark humor, but true:
We only notice utility when it breaks.
My glioma showed me that utility wasn’t a philosophy.
It was the architecture of survival —
and the devastation when that architecture drifts.
A warning that became a wayfinding
Somewhere in the years that followed —
through burnout, fracture, awakening, returning —
I began to see that I hadn’t tattooed an answer.
I had tattooed a warning.
And slowly, the warning became a wayfinding.
A compass.
For three years, without knowing it,
I filtered every decision, vocation, and relationship
through one quiet, stabilizing question:
Does this keep life alive —
in me, in others, in the world —
or is this drift?
It’s the question that allowed me to leave collapsing systems.
It’s the question that returned me to presence, grace, and spirit.
It’s the question that pulled me into discernment.
It’s the question that made seminary make sense.
It’s the question that birthed L.I.F.E.
The ring that was always facing inward
It hit me again when I looked at the tattoo —
the way it wraps around my wrist,
the way the word repeats in many languages,
the way the ink has softened into my skin.
A ring.
A boundary.
A reminder.
I thought I was tattooing something for the world to see.
But the tattoo was always angled toward me.
Only now do I understand why:
I had wrapped a band of languages around my body
naming the one truth every system lives or dies by:
Life’s purpose is life.
Everything else is drift.
The quiet invitation
What I thought was a statement
became a compass.
What I thought was clarity
became prophecy.
What I thought was identity
became orientation —
a ring around my spirit reminding me to stay within what keeps life alive
and to walk away from what doesn’t.
So now I ask, and I offer the question forward:
Does this keep life alive?
In me?
In others?
In the world?
Because if life’s utility is to “keep life alive”,
then the real work of being human
is learning how to live without forgetting that again.