The Treasure We Find Along the Way
An Essay by Jill Roberts
Scroll any social media site and you’re likely to encounter recent headlines about Prince Harry and his family’s apparent return to Britain after six years in California. Many of those headlines seem to carry the implication that leaving must have been a mistake if he’s returning.
That caught my attention—not because I have any particular investment in the royal family, but because I know something about leaving a life that no longer fits and eventually returning to a part of it.
My own journey started when I left an accounting career in 2017 to spend more time writing and to pursue a business. Stepping away from an identity that spanned nearly 20 years gave me the space to examine other parts of my life more honestly. In the years that followed, I made several other personal decisions that significantly changed the trajectory of my life, and in hindsight began a period of tremendous personal growth.
A few years ago, I read Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, and came away understanding why he felt he needed to leave royal life. His life since may not have been without difficulty. As with anyone undergoing change, he likely gained some of what he wanted, lost some things he may not have anticipated losing, made mistakes along the way, and is now setting a course that is more authentic and true to him.
Ultimately, I discovered that my career wasn’t the thing I needed to leave permanently. There were other things tangled up with it—how I wanted to work, what I wanted my life to feel like, how much of myself I was willing to surrender to a job, and what kind of professional identity fit the person I had become.
More importantly, I began to design my career and life intentionally rather than simply remaining on a path because it was the one I had already been traveling. Six years later when I returned to the same profession it was in a very different capacity—and I certainly was not the same person who left it. Yet, someone looking only at those two endpoints might conclude that I ended up right back where I started. But I didn’t.
We have a tendency to judge major life decisions retrospectively according to whether someone eventually circles back toward something they left. A career, a place, a relationship, an institution—if we reclaim any part of the old life, it can look from the outside like evidence that leaving it was a mistake. But human development isn’t that linear.
It reminds me of one of my favorite books, Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. Santiago leaves his familiar life in Spain and travels all the way to the pyramids of Egypt in search of treasure. Only after making that long and difficult journey does he discover that the treasure he was searching for was back where his journey began. But that’s the whole point. The journey wasn’t a detour that simply circled him back; the journey itself was what allowed him to recognize the treasure waiting where he began.
And perhaps that’s a more charitable way to view Harry’s apparent return to Britain as well. Sometimes we have to leave what we know, travel far enough away from it, and even find our way back before we can determine which parts of it actually belonged to us and which parts we were merely accommodating.
And yes, that is a remarkably ordinary human journey, one in which the understanding we gain along the way is the treasure we were searching for all along.