Discernment in Leadership as an Existential Return to Grace
Content note: This page includes a brief reference to self-harm, shared in the spirit of healing and hope.
There comes a moment in every leader’s life
when the questions become heavier than the answers.
A moment when the center loosens, the meaning thins,
and the world we’ve been carrying becomes too much for the soul to hold alone.
For me, the beginning of leadership did not come in a boardroom or a job title.
It began with Shakespeare’s old question echoing through the quiet:
“To be, or not to be?”
Not physically.
Spiritually.
Existentially.
To be — present, courageous, centered.
Or not to be — drifting, collapsing, performing.
Leadership, I would learn, is nothing more and nothing less than the daily decision to be.
This is the story of how I came to that truth, and the framework that emerged from it.
It is not a strategy.
It is a return.
THE MODERN DRIFT
We live in a time when leaders have titles, teams, metrics, and money —
yet very few have a center.
The demands are relentless.
The expectations contradictory.
The values negotiable.
The culture frantic.
The meaning inherited — but unsteady.
Leaders aren’t failing.
They are drifting.
And drift always brings us to the existential edge.
HAMLET’S QUESTION
Hamlet was not a philosopher.
He was a man collapsing under the weight of grief, betrayal, responsibility, confusion, and expectation.
His soliloquy was not a riddle — it was a rupture.
He wasn’t pondering life in theory.
He was wondering whether he could still find himself in a life that no longer felt like his.
“To be or not to be” is the question that surfaces
when belonging breaks and meaning collapses.
I know that landscape.
I have walked through it.
EXISTENTIALISM AS DOCUMENTED DRIFT
The existentialists — Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Beauvoir, Sartre, Camus —
all wrote during eras when the ground of meaning gave way.
Their writings weren’t born from clarity.
They were born from collapse.
Existentialism is the documentation of drift:
the self unmoored,
the self suspended,
the self without a center struggling to keep being.
They asked the right question.
But they did not yet know the answer.
MY RUPTURE
There was a season in my life when I drifted so far from my center that I believed there was no way back.
In that fog, I hurt myself.
I remember the EMTs arriving,
and somehow I was still conscious —
rambling about where my life had wandered,
as if trying to narrate my own disappearance.
I remember the hospital:
medication, solitude, and three days of lament.
I cried more in those hours than in the decade before.
Through the tears, something softened.
A small, steady clarity rose through the pain:
I wasn’t being punished or spared.
I was being held.
And I can only imagine what that season was like for Lauren —
to watch that collapse from the outside,
to hold fear and confusion where love once rested.
Looking back now, I see her presence as part of the same grace that carried me through.
When I walked out of the psych hold, I didn’t have answers.
But I had direction.
I had been given back to myself.
THE SPIRAL OF REMEMBERING
Since that day, my discernment has unfolded like a spiral of remembering:
- Following — humility, listening
- Leading — courage, accountability
- Following again — trust, surrender
- Being — presence, grace
This spiral became the foundation of my leadership.
But first, another truth had to surface.
WHAT HAMLET WAS HOLDING
When Hamlet asked, “To be or not to be,”
he wasn’t weighing a philosophical dilemma.
He was suffocating under what he could no longer carry.
He held grief, betrayal, obligation, moral weight, and abandonment.
He held a kingdom’s expectation with a collapsing sense of self.
And I recognize that terrain.
I held something similar:
- the slow erosion of my center
- the exhaustion of quiet holding
- the overwhelm of responsibility
- the ache of living outward while collapsing inward
- the fear that I could never return to myself
Hamlet’s question was the question of drift.
Mine was too.
But our answers diverged.
Where Hamlet found paralysis, my rupture revealed grace.
Where his question curled inward, mine opened outward.
Where he stood alone, I encountered presence.
THE QUESTION COLLAPSES
Here is what became clear:
When the choice becomes “not to be,” everything ends.
Not just breath —
but belonging,
becoming,
and the flow of love through a life.
And the ending rarely stays with one life.
The collapse of being often collapses others with it.
A suicide shatters a family.
A school shooting devastates a generation.
A church or synagogue attack wounds a whole faith community.
A suicide bombing fractures nations.
Domestic massacres destroy entire bloodlines.
And slowly, across society, unhealed drift becomes systemic harm —
leaders whose inner collapse shapes workplaces,
parents whose despair becomes generational inheritance,
communities whose wounds erupt into cycles of violence.
The truth is simple and devastating:
“Not to be” never ends with one person.
Existentialism could not see past this point.
But grace could.
Life, for itself, ends.
Life only lives when it flows through love.
This is where the question collapses
and discernment begins.
THE CHRIST OF PROXIMITY
In the stillness of that hospital,
I met not the distant God of doctrine,
but the Christ of proximity —
the One who sits beside you
when you cannot sit with yourself.
This is the grace existentialists never reached:
not meaning made,
but meaning given.
Not existence alone,
but existence held.
Existentialism ends in isolation.
My story begins in intimacy.
AN EXISTENTIALISM OF THIS TIME
Through that rupture, I realized something profound:
**I am an existentialist of this time —
but with access to Grace.**
Kierkegaard had faith but no proximity.
Nietzsche saw collapse but no restoration.
Camus saw absurdity but no revival.
Sartre saw freedom but no holding.
Beauvoir saw identity fracture but no center of belonging.
They wrote from drift.
I write from return.
**Existentialism is documented drift.
Grace is documented return.**
This is the missing half of the human story.
THE VOWS THAT FORMED MY CENTER
After that rupture, I made three quiet vows:
- Love without boundaries.
- Forgive without limits.
- Be kind without expectations.
Not as behaviors.
As being.
These vows became my center of gravity.
DISCERNMENT: THE LEADERSHIP SPIRAL
Leadership is not the mastery of direction.
It is the art of discernment.
To lead is to live from the center while guiding others toward theirs.
Following → Leading → Following Again → Being.
This spiral is not a model.
It is the rhythm of a soul returning to itself.
LEADERSHIP AS A SPIRITUAL ACT
Every leader faces micro-moments of “to be or not to be”:
- Do I act from ego or essence?
- From fear or presence?
- From performance or truth?
- From drift or center?
- From scarcity or grace?
Leadership is not performance.
Leadership is presence.
Presence comes from center.
Center comes from grace.
Grace comes from proximity.
A LEADER’S DAILY QUESTION
“To be, or not to be” is no longer a dilemma.
It is a daily choice.
Each morning: to be.
Each conflict: to be.
Each decision: to be.
Each moment of overwhelm: to be.
To be present.
To be centered.
To be held.
To be whole.
This is leadership.
A BLESSING FOR LEADERS
May you return to your center when you drift.
May you be held when you feel alone.
May you find the Christ of proximity in the cracks of your life.
May you know that leadership is not what you do —
it is who you are when you are fully here.
May you choose, again and again:
to be. Always.