The Elder at the Gate: How I Reclaimed My Spiritual Authority After the Nest Emptied

In the fall of 2018, after thirty-five years of calculating load paths and stress factors as a Structural Engineer in the Chicago suburbs, the silence in our Naperville home was deafening. My youngest son had just driven away for college, and for the first time in decades, the laundry hamper was empty. I looked at my clear calendar and felt a heavy, suffocating sense of purposelessness - what we in engineering might call a loss of "live load."