A month had passed with a foot of snow blanketing the region. A sheet of ice covered it like plate glass, keeping the surface pristine and untouched. None of the animals from the neighboring woods could break through the barrier, except for an occasional deer, and even they seemed to have found easier paths elsewhere. The twelve inches of snow remained intact through a long stretch of subzero temperatures. It looked as though Mother Nature had laid down a blanket and the world had fallen asleep. From our home near the Pennsylvania woods, we saw almost no signs of the usual winter activity.
When the temperatures finally rose and the rains arrived, the icy covering gave way almost overnight. The snow collapsed into itself and revealed the wet grass below, as if the ground were waking from a long slumber. Birds returned in a flourish. Flocks of robins descended on the softened soil in search of earthworms.
That is when I noticed the lines.
An irregular patchwork of trails ran across the lawn. They were not tunnels, exactly, but surface disturbances, as if something had been tracing looping paths just above the grass. A little research told me what they were. Vole highways. While the world slept, the voles had been busy. They had used the narrow airspace between snow and soil as a protected passageway, searching for the roots that would sustain them through winter.
As I stood there looking at those faint tracks, I found myself thinking about my own life’s searches. It may sound odd for a seventy‑four‑year‑old man to find meaning in the winter habits of a vole, but that is what we do as humans. We search. We search for companionship, comfort, and purpose. Dostoevsky might call it a tortured state of introspection. We call it soul‑searching.
Soul‑searching seems to be a valued activity, a way to locate ourselves in the order of things. We spend a great deal of time at it. And when we set aside our own searching, we turn to the stories of others. Movies, novels, and television series are filled with characters who struggle to find their way, their purpose, or their meaning.
The other night my wife and I settled in for an evening of streaming. We watched an episode from Season 6 of Outlander, the new season of Dark Winds, and the latest installment of Starfleet Academy. Three shows with almost nothing in common. Different eras, different worlds, different textures. Yet we enjoyed each one immensely. I commented on the diversity of the experience and how remarkable it was that such different stories could all land so powerfully.
Before I was fully out of my recliner, which takes longer than it should, the truth of it hit me. Every main character in every episode was facing a moment of reckoning. A crisis of confidence. A confrontation with who they were, really. They were all soul‑searching.
What does soul‑searching mean to you?
Is it a pause in the forward momentum of life?
A willingness to sit with discomfort instead of outrunning it?
A kind of interior honesty that demands action, not just reflection?
Or perhaps simply the courage to ask, “What am I really doing, and why?”
And yet, isn’t there more to soul‑searching than navel‑gazing? Doesn’t something need to change as a result of it?
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe is consumed by her past. Her interior life is crowded with memory, guilt, and self‑examination. Morrison makes it clear that introspection alone is a trap. Learning from our histories requires more than remembering. It requires stepping into a different future and reclaiming agency.
That distinction, the difference between reflection and transformation, reminded me of my younger brother. As a teenager, he had an extreme sensitivity about anyone touching his navel. It was, in its own way, the most severe case of navel‑gazing imaginable. He even researched and discovered the word oomphaloskepsis, a Greek term from the fourteenth century, to give his condition a medical‑sounding label. And as teenagers inevitably do, we turned it into a lighthearted game of teasing. At one point, I suggested that the cure might be a hula‑hoop with a nail in it.
Yes, I was mean to my younger brother. But the point stands. Navel‑gazing, even the ancient Greek variety, must become something more. Soul‑searching only matters if it leads to action. Otherwise, the nail in the hula‑hoop becomes a perfect metaphor for what circular introspection does to you.
This winter’s Olympics have been filled with the usual personal dramas. Athletes devote their entire sense of purpose to the dream of gold. Woven through those stories is a very visible form of jingoism, where the identity of the one becomes absorbed into the identity of the many under a single flag.
While watching the women’s gold‑medal hockey game between the United States and Canada, I felt that tension sharply. The crowd chanted U-S-A and CA-NA-DA in equal measure. The game was thrilling, and the Americans won in a close, come‑from‑behind victory. But as they wrapped themselves in the American flag, I found myself wondering how patriotic they felt in that moment. Not in the celebratory sense, but in the deeper, more complicated sense of representing a country that is being viewed with increasing unease on the world stage.
There were news stories from Milan of American athletes apologizing for what it means to be an American right now. “We are not really like that,” can be frequently heard. And as I watched the Canadian women absorb their loss, it struck me that the defeat felt amplified. Not because of the game itself, but because it was a loss to a nation whose political turmoil is unsettling the world order.
So where are we as a country?
What have we been doing these last few decades?
Have we been navel‑gazing as a nation, circling our own anxieties and insisting that we are not like this?
Isn’t it time for some serious soul‑searching, the kind that leads to a different course and not just a different conversation? Or are we content to continue wandering our own vole highways, tracing the same looping paths beneath the surface, searching for sustenance without ever realizing that the snow has melted and the world is watching?
Maybe that is what all these moments have been trying to show me. The vole trails under the snow, the stories on our screen, the athletes on the ice. Soul‑searching is not about staring inwardly until we feel something. It is about noticing what rises to the surface when the world finally thaws. We keep telling ourselves we are not like this, as if saying it could make it so. Perhaps the more honest and more hopeful place to begin is simply here, with who we are right now. If we can see ourselves clearly, without flinching or defending, finally recognizing that we actually are like that, then we can choose the next step with intention. Maybe that is all soul‑searching really asks of us. Not perfection or certainty, but the willingness to turn gently toward a better direction.
Every honest look inward carries the quiet possibility of a better direction.