Everything is in process of becoming.  Becoming what?  We people are different than animals and plants because we ask the question.  This much I know of the answer: I must become more than I am, and I must understand the meaning of what I’m becoming.

Aquinas says that every creature seeks to flourish according to his nature, and by so doing, he seeks his highest good and ultimate end.  Hence, I must first know my human nature to answer the questions of who should I become and what's my highest good.  I can become something only within the bounds of my nature: I can’t grow wings and become more of a bird.

I follow Aquinas in believing that human nature is embodied soul.  I am soul and body together and inseparable.  I am an animal whose end is survival and reproduction, and I am more than that.  I live for higher purpose.  Imagine a teenager in the Covid year trapped at home with nothing but Youtube.  A million choices in every second, all meaningless, all voluntary slavery.  Is that boy more than this?  Yes!  That boy is more than a meat platform who survives on Cheetos and Mountain Dew and who transmits DNA in some dystopian future via test tube.  That boy needs a mission, a hero’s journey that burns off his Covid self and his Covid slavery.  That boy needs a higher purpose.

Sebastian Junger took a hero’s journey to a new self, and he talked about it on the EconTalk Podcast, June 2021.  Mr. Junger and a group of buddies walked the railroad lines from DC to Philadelphia then to a town near Pittsburgh.  They hiked 400 miles, covered 10-20 miles a day, avoided the cops, and carried 70 pound packs with machetes.  To Mr. Junger, they were prehistoric nomads living out their true human nature as tribe.  But all journeys end, and about the end he said,

“You don't know your stopping point until you arrive, really, I think. And, all of a sudden we were sitting in Connellsville (near Pittsburgh) and it was a brutally hot day. We'd been walking for days in this incredible heat. We'd basically boiled out feet in our boots; and it's awful what happens to your skin and tissue in high heat when you're walking like that with a heavy weight. … And, my feet didn't work, and I just thought, all of a sudden I realized, ‘Oh, this is the end of the trip.’ Like, ‘I don't need to go further. It's probably not good to go further.’ Now the new trip begins, which is returning to my life and resolving some of the issues that have arisen in the last years.  (Mr. Junger was in a bad divorce.)  And I did. I remarried, I have two beautiful little girls age four and age one-and-a-half. I don't know if that walk was part of it, but something landed me here in a very good place.”