012 — WHY AM I HERE?
The People, Experiences, and Spiritual Pattern That Led Me Toward My Earthly Calling
If my life has meaning, what does that meaning now require of me?
A Sunday Question
It was Sunday, September 6, 2026. I was sitting quietly, waiting for breakfast, writing in the journal that had become one of the places where I could speak most freely with myself. Nothing extraordinary was happening around me. It was simply another Sunday afternoon in the physical world. Yet inside me, the journey of an entire lifetime was moving, and I found myself writing the question that had followed me in different forms for years: Why am I here?
Not simply, why am I alive? Why this life? Why was I born into this family? Why did I become a soldier? Why did West Point acquire such spiritual importance for me? Why did certain people enter my life precisely when they did? Why did I travel where I traveled? Why did I love the people I loved? Why did I lose some of them? Why did business become part of my development? Why did I keep being brought back to responsibility for other people? And why, after everything that has happened, am I still here?
As I sat with the question, something became clearer. Perhaps the answer was never going to arrive as a sentence from Heaven. Perhaps it had already been unfolding through the people I had loved. When I look backward now, one force seems to have moved through almost every major turning point of my life: love of another person. Not always romantic love. Sometimes compassion, friendship, family responsibility, loyalty, the desire to protect another human being, or a relationship that lasted only long enough to move me toward the next stage of life. Again and again, another person became the reason I moved. And every time I moved, I changed.
My personality was being formed through the experience. I did not understand that while I was living it. I understand it better now.
Love Was Moving Me
There was a period of my life when I found myself living among people who possessed very little materially. JC became part of that journey. Living with and loving people who were poor changed something inside me that could never have been learned from a textbook, a business meeting, or a classroom. Poverty looks different when it is observed from a distance. It becomes something else when the people experiencing it have names, personalities, fears, humor, dignity, weaknesses, hopes, and stories. They stop being ‘the poor.’ They become people you know, people you eat with, people you speak with, people whose lives enter yours.
I began learning something that would return much later when I cared for Mom, Pop, and eventually Margie: a human being cannot be reduced to economic condition, physical condition, age, illness, or usefulness. There is something within the human personality that deserves dignity. At the time, I did not have the language I use today—the Divine Personality of Man, the Universal Creative Life Force, the Reciprocal Relationship, Spiritual Intelligence. I was simply living. But life was educating me, and love of other people was enlarging my consciousness. The person who emerged from those experiences was not exactly the person who had entered them. That pattern would repeat itself again and again.
Then there was Paula. Love changed the direction of my life again. Looking backward, I can see how deeply my relationship with Paula became connected with my professional development and with the path that carried me into Westinghouse Security Systems. At the time, I could not have drawn a diagram showing where the relationship was taking me. Life rarely works that way. We meet someone. We care. We make decisions because another human being matters to us. Those decisions place us in circumstances we could not have predicted, and then those circumstances begin transforming us.
My journey through Westinghouse exposed me to a different scale of professional life: corporate structure, security, management, leadership, responsibility, and systems larger than the individual. I was moving from one consciousness into another. The young man who had experienced military life, spiritual searching, and life among people with very little was now being educated by corporate America. In time, that road would carry me toward senior leadership responsibility in the security industry. But even that was not the destination. It was another stage of formation, and Paula remained connected in my memory with the movement that opened that stage.
The Road West
The Westinghouse period did not continue forever. When that professional chapter ended, I went to Pittsburgh seeking answers and attempting to appeal what had happened to me. I remember arriving in fatigues. I remember unexpectedly obtaining access to a senior Westinghouse security leader. I remember receiving help that allowed me to recover my automobile and begin moving again. At one level these were simply events. At another, they were another rupture in identity. The professional structure in which I had been operating was gone, and once again I had to ask: Who am I now?
Then I learned that Paula had gone to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and love moved me again. I headed west, but even that journey did not proceed directly. My road carried me through Florida, where I spent time caring for my grandmother and again found myself close to people living in poverty. Family and poverty. Caregiving and survival. Love and responsibility. Themes that would reappear decades later were already being written into my personality. I could not see the pattern because I was inside it. From Florida, the journey continued through Washington and then westward toward Albuquerque, toward Paula, and toward whatever I believed might still be waiting there.
Albuquerque became important for another reason I could never have predicted: I met Pascal. Another person, another doorway. That is one of the remarkable things I now see when I examine my life. A person would appear, and suddenly geography itself would change. A new relationship would move me toward a new place. Pascal spoke about Santa Fe. She told me how beautiful it was and suggested that we could go there and share a place. Albuquerque became a bridge to Santa Fe. I had traveled west because of one relationship; another relationship carried me farther.
I do not claim that every human decision was supernaturally dictated. Human beings possess free will. We make choices. Other people make choices. Circumstances intervene. But looking backward through the lens of faith, I can see how relationships repeatedly became vehicles of transformation. Paula had drawn my life toward Albuquerque. Pascal opened the road toward Santa Fe. And Santa Fe would change me again.
Santa Fe and the Entrepreneur Being Formed
Santa Fe was unlike the corporate world I had known. The life I experienced there stripped away many of the external markers by which people normally measure success. After Pascal returned to France, I found myself living much closer to the edge. For a period I stayed at a Zen Buddhist temple in exchange for room and board. I sold flowers. I sold fruit. I sold copies of a speech that cost approximately ten cents to reproduce and that I could sell for a dollar. When food stamps were available to me, I remember giving qualifying food assistance to a Mexican family in exchange for help with room and board. I was learning survival, but I was learning more than survival.
I was discovering how adaptable the human personality can become. The corporate executive and the man selling flowers were not two entirely different human beings. They were two expressions of one developing person. Status is temporary. Titles are temporary. Money can come and go. Organizations can disappear. Relationships can end. Yet something within the individual continues developing through all of it. This is part of what I now mean when I write about the Divine Personality of Man. I do not mean that man becomes God. I mean that the human personality appears capable of extraordinary development through experience—becoming more compassionate, creative, resilient, responsible, and aware of other people. Sometimes the experiences that appear to reduce us materially are the very experiences that enlarge us spiritually.
Eventually circumstances changed again. I shared an apartment with two men and found work with an alarm company in New Mexico. Security returned. Technology returned. Business returned. But I was no longer encountering them only through the structure of a large corporation. I was beginning to see them through the eyes of the individual worker, salesman, and entrepreneur. Then AMWAY entered the story. At the time, I understood it as the American Way. Whatever one ultimately thinks about a particular business organization, the important point in my life was what the experience awakened in me: the idea that an individual could build something.
The entrepreneur did not have to wait for a corporation to provide an identity. A person could create, sell, organize, build relationships, serve customers, accept risk, generate value, and take responsibility for success or failure. Something within my personality was shifting again. The soldier had learned duty. The man living among the poor had learned compassion. The corporate world had taught me systems and management. The journey west had taught me adaptability. Santa Fe had taught me survival. The alarm business and AMWAY began teaching me entrepreneurship. I was becoming someone I had not been before.
The Road Home
The road west was not where I would ultimately remain, because another form of love was calling: family. The journey turned east, back toward Farmingdale, back toward Mom and Pop, back toward the place from which so much of my life had begun. My father’s health became part of that decision. Around that period, his serious aneurysm prognosis made family responsibility impossible for me to treat as an abstraction. I had traveled outward searching for life. Now life was asking me to return home.
Love had sent me outward, and love brought me back. The Edward who returned to Farmingdale was not the Edward who had left. I returned carrying pieces of every experience: military discipline, corporate experience, poverty, spiritual searching, selling, security technology, entrepreneurship, success, failure, love, loss, and adaptability. I brought those experiences home with me, and now they could be placed at the service of family.
Returning home was not the end of the pilgrimage. It became the beginning of another one. My relationship with Pop took on new dimensions. Family responsibility and business began coming together. The experiences accumulated during my travels could now be translated into something concrete: an alarm company, entrepreneurship, Moore Enterprises Inc. What had existed as scattered experiences began becoming an enterprise.
Entrepreneurship itself became part of what I now understand as the Reciprocal Relationship. America had given me the freedom to move, work, fail, begin again, sell, learn, create a company, employ people, serve customers, and build. Freedom was no longer merely a political idea. I experienced it as the practical possibility of creating a life. And the person creating that company had been prepared by the road that came before it. Nothing was wasted. Even the painful experiences contributed something.
Margie: Love Becomes Responsibility
Years later, another person entered my life who would transform me more profoundly than I could have understood when we met. Margie. My Queen. I met Margie on August 22, 1992. Once again, love changed direction into responsibility. Margie entered not simply into my personal life but into my family. She became part of the responsibilities I carried. She shared life with Mom and Pop and became connected with my children, nieces, nephews, and eventually grandchildren. We created vacations, meals, celebrations, and ordinary moments that seemed small while we were living them and became priceless once they were gone.
Through Margie I began understanding love at another level. Romantic love was part of it. Companionship was part of it. But eventually love became caregiving. When Mom and Pop required care, love became physical work—being present, watching, helping, protecting, remaining. Margie helped me carry that responsibility. Together we tried to provide my parents with dignity within their own home until the end of their earthly lives. Years later, when Margie’s own health declined, the direction reversed. The woman who had helped me care for others now needed me.
During those years she progressively lost abilities most of us take for granted: walking, speaking, eating, independence. Once again life placed the same lesson before me: love must become responsibility or eventually it becomes only a word. On October 28, 2016, Margie left this world in my arms. That experience transformed me again. There was Edward before Margie, Edward with Margie, and Edward after Margie. They are the same man, but they are not the same personality. Love had changed me. Loss changed me again.
This is one reason my thoughts have returned so strongly to Robert. Robert knew Grandma Margie while she was alive. I remember picking him up from daycare, bringing him back to the apartment, playing games while Margie watched, and taking him to the pond to see the ducks. Those moments seemed ordinary. Now I see them differently. Margie’s love crossed generations through them. Robert experienced her; he did not merely inherit a story about a grandmother he never knew. Something of Margie’s earthly life entered another generation directly. People die, but relationships continue operating through memory. A grandmother influences a grandson. A father influences a son. A wife changes a husband. A friend changes a friend. One personality enters another, and the effects continue after the original person is gone. Perhaps that is one of the ways love defeats time.
West Point, Service, and the Reciprocal Relationship
Places also changed me. West Point became one of them. My relationship with West Point developed into something much deeper than admiration for a military academy. It became almost a spiritual Mecca for me, a place where my faith in the American military was renewed. That feeling became so powerful that I once attempted to walk there from Farmingdale. I walked north and kept going, mile after mile, until my physical condition became serious near the area leading toward West Point. A bus driver saw me, recognized that I was in trouble, and instead of simply continuing on his route, personally helped me and drove me back toward Farmingdale.
Even inside a pilgrimage motivated by my own spiritual search, another human being appeared. Another act of concern. Another person helping carry me when I could no longer carry myself. The journey to West Point was about duty, honor, America, military service, and my search for meaning. But hidden inside it was the same lesson that appears throughout my life: we are carried by other people.
This may be what I have been trying to describe through the idea of the Reciprocal Relationship. Life gives to us. Other people give to us. Parents give to children. Teachers give to students. Soldiers give to citizens. Friends give to friends. A wife gives to a husband. A stranger on a bus can give compassion to another stranger. America gives opportunities that previous generations struggled to preserve. But receiving cannot be the final movement. At some point the question becomes: What will I return?
What will I do with everything that was given to me? If people loved me, whom will I love? If people helped me, whom will I help? If America gave me freedom, what will I build with that freedom? If experience gave me knowledge, how will I use it? If suffering gave me compassion, how will that compassion enter the world? That reciprocal movement may be one of the deepest laws of my own life.
The Personality Still Being Formed
I now understand my life through another idea as well: the development of what I call the Divine Personality of Man. I do not mean that human beings become God. I mean that the creative Spirit can express itself through the development of human personality. Love changes us. Responsibility changes us. Work changes us. Suffering changes us. Freedom changes us. Relationships change us. If we respond well, those experiences can develop qualities that I associate with the Divine: truth, compassion, wisdom, creativity, courage, responsibility, service, and love.
The spiritual world does not therefore need to remain separated from the physical world. It enters the physical world through human beings. A thought becomes a decision. A decision becomes action. Action becomes relationship. Relationships build families. Families influence communities. People build businesses. Businesses build infrastructure. Citizens build institutions. Institutions shape nations. Nations shape history. The inner development of the human personality eventually becomes part of the external development of civilization.
This is why I cannot separate my spiritual life from my work. Moore Enterprises was not merely a company. Westinghouse was not merely employment. The alarm industry was not merely technology. THL SCI is not merely a business concept. SUNY Farmingdale is not merely an educational institution. Each represents another place where ideas can become physical reality. Today civilization depends upon systems most people rarely see: structured wired networks, telecommunications, cybersecurity, physical security, operational technology, artificial intelligence, data centers, electrical infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, and financial networks. Everything depends upon something else, and people must still build, install, integrate, protect, maintain, repair, and improve those systems.
That is why the work I am now doing through THL SCI and the SUNY initiative feels connected to the same journey that began decades ago. The experiences were different, but the underlying calling may be the same: develop people, build systems, protect dignity, create opportunity, and serve something larger than oneself. The proposed Farmingdale pathway has therefore become more than an educational idea to me. I see the young technician, the student, the veteran, the immigrant, the person who may not attend an elite university, the worker who possesses intelligence and practical ability but needs a pathway, the future licensed contractor, the future entrepreneur, the person who may someday employ others.
I understand something about that person because parts of my own life were lived outside conventional paths. The individual selling flowers can later build a business. The man temporarily living with little can later employ people. The person experiencing failure can later become a leader. Human potential cannot always be recognized from someone’s present circumstances. I learned that through my own life. Now I want educational institutions to understand it as well.
The People Were the Road
Even now, people continue entering the story. The General has repeatedly returned me to one word: Focus. Bin represents another form of relationship—a younger professional connection built around trust, work, technology, learning, and the possibility of carrying knowledge forward. These relationships are different from the relationships of my past. They belong to the work that remains, and that has forced me to learn another lesson: not every relationship is meant to accompany us through every stage of life.
Some people belong to one chapter. Some open a door. Some walk with us for years. Some become family. Some teach through love. Some teach through loss. Some help us understand when it is time to move on. Discernment is part of spiritual maturity. At this stage of my life, I cannot allow every voice, every relationship, or every distraction equal access to my remaining time. Calling requires selection. Love does not eliminate discipline. Sometimes love makes discipline necessary.
Looking backward, I once thought of my life as a series of places: Farmingdale, military service, Westinghouse, Pittsburgh, Florida, Washington, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, New Mexico, and home again. But perhaps geography was never the real road. People were the road. A person would appear. Love would awaken. Responsibility would emerge. A decision would follow. The decision would move me physically somewhere else. The new environment would challenge me, and the challenge would transform another part of my personality. Then someone else would appear, and the journey would begin again.
When viewed that way, my life becomes less a collection of disconnected episodes and more a pilgrimage of human relationships. That does not prove that every event was divinely ordained. I cannot know that. But through faith, I can testify to how I have come to understand it. I believe love has repeatedly been the moving spirit of my life. Sometimes I recognized it immediately. Sometimes I understood it only decades later.
Why Am I Still Here?
And so I return to that Sunday afternoon, September 6, 2026, my journal open before me and the question: Why am I here? Looking backward now, perhaps I had been asking the wrong version of the question. Perhaps the question is not, Why did all these things happen to me? Perhaps it is, What did all these people and experiences make possible within me?
JC and life among the poor developed compassion. Paula moved my heart and helped redirect my professional life. Westinghouse developed another level of professional consciousness. Albuquerque represented pursuit and transition. Pascal opened the road to Santa Fe. Santa Fe stripped away certainty and taught adaptability. The Zen experience expanded spiritual searching. Selling flowers, fruit, and speeches taught survival and initiative. The alarm company returned me to security from a different perspective. AMWAY strengthened the entrepreneurial idea. Pop and family called me home. Farmingdale became the place of return. Moore Enterprises gave entrepreneurship a physical form. Margie transformed love into family, caregiving, sacrifice, and enduring spiritual presence. Robert showed me how love travels across generations. West Point renewed duty and service. America gave me the freedom within which all these transformations could occur. And now THL SCI, SUNY Farmingdale, Witness to Calling, the General, Bin, and the work still before me represent another stage.
The journey has never merely been about where I went. It has been about who I became because I went there. Memory must therefore become purpose. I do not want to remember these people merely because I miss them. I want to understand what they placed within me. Otherwise the past becomes only nostalgia. The people I loved deserve more from me than nostalgia. Their lives should produce something. Margie’s love should produce more love. Pop’s example should produce responsibility. The sacrifices of soldiers should produce citizenship worthy of their sacrifice. My professional experience should produce something useful for the generation following me. My failures should produce wisdom. My opportunities should produce gratitude. My freedom should produce creation. My remaining time should produce work.
This is why the word Focus has become so important. Focus is not separate from spirituality. Focus is how spirituality becomes productive. The book must be written. The stories must be preserved. The website must communicate them. THL SCI must continue becoming something real. The SUNY initiative must continue moving toward the people capable of developing it. Professional relationships must be strengthened. Business must generate economic reality. Knowledge accumulated over decades must be transferred. Ideas must become documents. Documents must become conversations. Conversations must become meetings. Meetings must become decisions. Decisions must become action. Action must create something capable of surviving beyond the individual who first imagined it. That is the movement from spirit into matter.
The governing question remains: If my life has meaning, what does that meaning now require of me? I think I understand the answer better than I once did. It requires me to recognize that love was never merely something I received. Love repeatedly moved me. Love transformed me. Love placed responsibilities before me. Love sent me across the country. Love brought me home. Love asked me to care for people. Love asked me to let people go. Love taught me to build. Love taught me to remember. And now love asks me to complete what remains.
I cannot return to the young man who lived those earlier chapters, and I should not want to. Every person and every experience added something. The personality was being formed, and it is still being formed. I remain here on Earth. Therefore the process is not finished. I still have choices to make, people to serve, work to complete, knowledge to give, and love to carry forward. Perhaps that is finally what calling means—not that one day God hands us a complete map of our lives, but that calling is gradually revealed as we learn to recognize the meaning of the road already traveled and then accept responsibility for the road still before us.
So when I ask today, Why am I here? I no longer look only toward Heaven for an answer. I look at the people. I look at the journey. I look at the man those experiences created. And I look at the work still waiting. Then I understand: Remember. Discern. Focus. Create. Serve. Complete the work. Because love has been carrying me from one chapter to another for most of my life. And while I remain here on Earth, the calling continues.