My First Tipping Point: The Day Shrek Walked My Daughter Down the Aisle

I experienced my first tipping point the morning after my oldest daughter’s wedding.

Looking at photos taken by others of my beautiful daughter walking down the aisle — accompanied by Shrek — woke me up for the second time that morning. For reasons still mysterious to me, I had shaved my head down to a crew cut for the wedding. When I saw the picture, I did a double-take. My first unfiltered thought was, Who is that really fat guy with my daughter?

My daughter looked radiant. I looked… like her ogre bodyguard

If you’re reading this, you already have a sense of who you are — your habits, your opinions, the cast of existential clowns that make up your personal circus. What matters most, though, is how closely that public self matches the quieter truth underneath.

When those two selves drift too far apart, truth shows up uninvited. And that first glimpse of honesty is rarely the end of transformation. It’s the beginning.

Transformation can strike like lightning. The first time I skydived, I jumped from a U.S. Air Force C-130 at 12,000 feet — solo, not tandem — and changed instantly. In my world, becoming a Military Free-Fall Parachutist was a professional and physical summit. After days of training, I packed my own chute, stepped off the open ramp into the slipstream, and fell stable. That single moment flipped a switch in my brain.

But transformation can also creep in on “rock time.”

If you spend enough days in the backcountry, you start to notice that the world moves at different speeds. Rocks alter on a scale that mocks our ambitions; even trees — blips in time compared to rocks — grow too quietly to notice. Change that lasts usually happens like that: imperceptible, until one day it’s undeniable.

Looking at that photo, I didn’t just see a fat man beside my daughter. I saw the version of myself I’d stopped noticing. That morning, something shifted inside me — an uneasy awareness of what I had become. But awareness alone isn’t transformation.

Two years later, gasping for air on a trail above timberline, I learned what happens when realization doesn’t become action.

Tomorrow, I’ll share what happened on that mountain — and how it finally changed everything.