The Winding Trail
Life doesn’t always unfurl like a neatly drawn map. The lines we sketch as children (graduate, build a career, marry, raise children, retire) rarely survive contact with the weather of reality. Instead, most of us find ourselves on winding trails: paths with switchbacks, false summits, detours, and unexpected valleys.
From the outside, those twists can look like inconsistency. But what I’ve learned, through military service, ministry, business, consulting, and fatherhood, is this: integrity does not always resemble a straight line. Integrity often looks like choosing what matters most. Over and over again.
In mountain climbing, a direct ascent up a sheer face isn’t always possible. Sometimes the safest, most faithful route is a series of traverses and pivots, moving sideways to go upward. Integrity is like that: less about rigid consistency, more about staying aligned with the deeper compass of values.
The Myth of the Straight Path
We live in a culture obsessed with consistency. Resumes are judged by linearity, brands by coherence, leaders by predictability. To deviate is often labeled as failure or instability. But psychology suggests otherwise.
Researchers Deci and Ryan (2000), in their work on self-determination theory, argue that human flourishing comes not from rigid consistency but from autonomy, competence, and relatedness. The ability to live aligned with one’s values, even if that means course-correcting along the way. Similarly, developmental psychologist Robert Kegan (1994) describes adult growth as movement through increasingly complex meaning-making systems, each requiring disruption of the old to make room for the new. Growth itself requires nonlinear steps.
What looks like inconsistency, then, is often the natural rhythm of adaptation. Like a hiker navigating shifting terrain, integrity means refusing to be trapped by the illusion of a straight line when the trail itself bends.
The Turning Points Were Never About Career
When I left the military, it wasn’t because I lost interest or lacked commitment. It was because an injury ended my service.
I once resigned as the Director of Product Marketing for a global firm. On paper, it was a dream job. Influence, a respected title, impressive salary and the chance to shape messaging that reached audiences around the world. From the outside, leaving looked like inconsistency. Who walks away from that kind of opportunity?
But staying would have cost me something far greater than prestige: my integrity. The direction the company was heading no longer aligned with my values. To remain would have meant bending truth, shading motives, and prioritizing profit over people. And I couldn’t do it.
These choices, on paper, may look like reinventions or inconsistencies. But they were not about career; they were about priority. Integrity demanded choosing family over title, health over image, and presence over ambition.
Integrity, I’ve learned, sometimes looks like saying no to what others would die to say yes to. It looks like stepping off a trail everyone else calls “success” because you know it leads you away from your compass.
Psychologist James Rest (1994) described integrity as the integration of moral judgment and moral action. Not just knowing what is right, but having the courage to live it. Quitting was not about losing interest or running from challenges. It was about choosing a deeper alignment, even at personal cost.
From the outside, my path may look like zigzags: military, marketing, consulting, teaching, fatherhood. But the through-line is clear. Each choice, each pivot, has been about staying true to what matters most, not ambition, but integrity.
An Honest Life
We live in a world of curated feeds and polished brands. It’s easy to assume that someone writing about truth, masculinity, or resilience is merely building an image. But I am not curating a persona, I am documenting a journey.
The lessons I share come not from marketing strategy but from lived places: therapy sessions, failures, reconciliations, long nights of prayer, and the messy, holy work of trying to raise children with steadiness in a fractured world.
Brené Brown (2012) describes this as wholehearted living: embracing vulnerability, imperfection, and courage rather than hiding behind the armor of consistency. Authenticity, she argues, is not about being the same every day but about staying true to who we are in the midst of change.
In that light, what looks like inconsistency is actually integrity in action. The willingness to keep showing up as real, even when the script changes.
Control vs. Clarity
I like structure. I like maps, cairns, and clear markers on a trail. But life rarely hands us a tidy topographic map. More often, we’re handed fog, rockfall, and weather that shifts without warning.
The temptation in those moments is to grab tighter. To control outcomes, people, or perceptions. But control is a brittle tool. What I’ve learned to seek instead is clarity. Clarity does not eliminate risk, but it provides orientation. It asks: What are my values? Who matters most? Where does the compass point, even if the terrain is rough?
Psychologist Viktor Frankl (2006) insisted that meaning, not control, is what sustains us in suffering. We cannot dictate outcomes, but we can choose our response. Integrity is not about mastering chaos but about refusing to be mastered by it.
Yes, I’ve wrestled with the need to hold things together too tightly. But I’ve also learned the courage of release: of letting clarity, not control, lead. I’ve explored this before in Keeping the Fire: Finding Strength When Life Gets Hard.
The Trail From the Outside Doesn’t Tell the Whole Story
When hikers look at a mountain from afar, they often misjudge the route. What looks like a straight line to the summit usually hides countless switchbacks, ledges, and traverses. Similarly, what others see from the outside rarely tells the full story.
A résumé or timeline might suggest inconsistency: military, ministry, business, consulting, teaching, fatherhood. But from the inside, the through-line is obvious. Every pivot has been anchored in the same core: values of service, presence, resilience, and love.
Research in narrative psychology (McAdams & McLean, 2013) shows that humans construct meaning through life stories, not job titles. What matters most is not whether the story is linear, but whether it is coherent Whether the person sees their life as aligned with purpose and values.
And I do. My compass has not changed, even when the scenery has.
Integrity in Motion
What does this mean for the rest of us, for parents, leaders, or anyone walking a winding trail? It means we need to release the illusion that integrity looks like never changing.
Integrity is motion; choosing again and again to orient toward what matters most. In parenting, that might mean leaving work early for a sick child. In leadership, it might mean shifting strategies when a team’s health is at stake. In relationships, it might mean apologizing and changing course when we’ve hurt someone we love.
Consistency for its own sake can become rigidity. Integrity, by contrast, is a living alignment with values, one that bends without breaking.
As mountaineers know, a cairn is not a straight pillar. It is a stack of uneven stones, each balanced carefully on the last. Integrity builds the same way: not from perfect linearity, but from a series of choices stacked faithfully over time.
Reflection: What Compass Are You Following?
So here is the question: What compass are you following?
Are you chasing consistency for appearances’ sake or integrity for meaning’s sake? Do your choices flow from values, or from fear of how the path will look to others?
Life rarely offers neat categories. The path will twist. The trail will disappear and reappear. False summits will rise. But integrity doesn’t demand a straight line. It demands faithfulness to what matters most, again and again.That’s not inconsistency.
That’s integrity in motion.
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