After roughly two years of unexplained grumpiness, Alicia came home from the office, placed a trekking brochure in front of Jeff Rasley, and asked, "Why don't you go do this?" The brochure offered a trek to Everest Base Camp. Her suggestion was affectionate, perceptive and startlingly literal: go take a hike, on the other side of the world.
On paper, Jeff's life already looked complete. By 40, he had a successful career, financial freedom, a loving marriage and a family. Yet one question kept pressing him: "Is this all there is?" He felt unhappy, then guilty for being unhappy. If the life he had worked toward was not enough, perhaps something was wrong with him.
Alicia's brochure was more than an invitation to travel. It showed that she could see something Jeff had struggled to name: the life he had built was good, but parts of him had gone missing within it. He did not need to dismiss everything he had created. He needed to identify those absences precisely and find another route toward them.
He did not need to dismiss everything he had created.
Jeff had built a good life and lost two parts of himself
Jeff's dissatisfaction did not come from inactivity or obvious failure. He was a lawyer who eventually headed a small boutique firm, ran a real estate finance business on the side and served, at one point, on seven corporate boards. He was active in his church, coached his two young children's teams and valued his marriage. His days were full of responsibility, connection and evidence that he was doing well.
But a full life is not necessarily a fulfilling one. Jeff had once hitchhiked across the country, motorcycled across North America and backpacked around Europe. As his career expanded, ordinary vacations replaced that kind of travel. He no longer had adventure in his life. Instead of settling for a vague declaration that he wanted "something more," he worked out what "more" meant to him.
The second absence was direct involvement in social justice. In high school, Jeff and his girlfriend organized their hometown's first Walk for Hunger. His first legal job was with a legal services organization doing poverty law and social justice work. He led Indiana's first rent strike and organized a class action lawsuit against landlords he described as slumlords. Board service remained part of his adult life, but he no longer felt involved on the ground, in the daily work that mattered beyond income and professional connections.
Admitting this was difficult because Jeff had absorbed the traditional male expectation to be strong and stoic. He had supervised two different younger attorneys whose depression became visible in their work, even when they did not want to acknowledge it. Yet when he began to recognize something similar in himself, he did not want to tell his law partner or office staff. He only partly admitted it to Alicia, who was already living with the consequences of his unhappiness.
Outward success can make honest self-examination feel like ingratitude. The expectation to remain strong and stoic can also turn distress into something to hide. Jeff's later advice begins with a private inventory: What is missing? The answer is not what should be missing, or what would make sense to someone looking at your life from the outside. It is specific and personal. Until that question has an answer, there is no way to know which path to seek.
Jeff's later advice begins with a private inventory: What is missing?
Alicia's trekking brochure opened more than one path
Alicia understood that Jeff's spirit of adventure had been central to who he was when they met. The Everest Base Camp brochure did not ask him to abandon his marriage, career or family. It offered a way to restore something that had been crowded out. When Jeff mentioned the trek to his chiropractor, Dr. John immediately wanted to join him. Dr. John's marriage was falling apart, and he recognized a more intense version of the same dissatisfaction.
Jeff had never been particularly interested in hiking or mountaineering. Living in Indiana, he joked, had not given him many mountains to climb. His earlier adventures included scuba diving, motorcycling, flying an airplane and jumping out with a parachute. In Nepal, however, the mountains captivated him, as did the people living among them.
The high-mountain people he met, mostly Sherpas, combined extraordinary physical endurance with kindness and happiness. Their lives appeared hard, but their manner was neither hardened nor joyless. Jeff wanted to become more like them. He returned home eager to go back, trained in mountaineering and later traveled to Ladakh, India, where he climbed his first big mountain.
This new direction also disrupted the spiritual path he had been following. Before these journeys took hold, Jeff had decided that ministry might answer his dissatisfaction. He studied in seminary for three years while continuing to practice law full-time and earned a Master in Divinity. Near the end of the Presbyterian ordination process, he preached a sermon about the Rai people and the beauty of their animistic spirituality. A woman evaluating him observed that he sounded more Buddhist than Calvinist Presbyterian. Although the sermon concerned animism rather than Buddhism, Jeff understood her larger point: the Presbyterian ministry was no longer his path.
He eventually began describing himself as an animistic agnostic. The Rai belief that everything has spirit, even rocks, appealed to him because it encouraged a respectful relationship with the world, other people and animals. At the same time, he did not claim conventional belief or disbelief in God. His most honest answer was simply, "I don't know."
After leaving the Presbyterian Church, Jeff considered the Unitarians, attended a Moravian church for a time and settled into a Quaker meeting. When he began raising money for Basa Village without having a foundation, that Quaker meeting offered to act as fiscal agent without charging anything. The path that restored his appetite for adventure was also connecting spirituality with practical service. In time, it took him to Basa Village.
The path that restored his appetite for adventure was also connecting spirituality with practical service.
Basa Village defined help as ownership, not dependency
In 2006, Jeff hired Adventure Geotreks for a mountaineering expedition. The company's owner, Niru Rai, came from Basa Village and hired people from his community as porters, guides, cooks, kitchen workers and sirdars. Unlike groups assembled from different villages, this team already knew one another well. Jeff saw the endurance and kindness that had impressed him before, along with a clear sense of community.
At the end of the expedition, Niru Rai and the sirdar Ganesh Rai approached Jeff with a request. Basa's school offered three grades, and the village wanted to add fourth and fifth grades. Could Jeff make raising $5,000 part of his philanthro-trekking? That amount would pay two additional teachers for three years. The teachers were paid $40 per month.
Jeff raised $7,000, mainly from friends, trekkers and climbers. The need was plain: the K-12 school was two hours away from Basa, requiring a four-hour daily walk. Older students could manage it, but the distance was too demanding for many 10 and 11-year-olds. Without fourth and fifth grades nearby, children were more likely to leave school before they were ready to continue to the high-school level.
The trek into Basa made the value of those two grades unmistakable. After the road ended, the group had to cross two passes at 10,000. Ten people began the trek, but only three reached the village. They found the entire community waiting. Musicians led them in with drums, trumpets and flutes. Villagers had erected a welcome arch in English and placed chrysanthemum leis around their necks until the flowers rose so high that they had to remove some to accept more.
Jeff felt that the visitors had done very little. Basa Village saw the result differently: its children would have two more years of schooling close to home. Yet that gratitude did not give outsiders permission to decide what the village should want next. When the Basa Village Foundation USA and the Basa Village Foundation Nepal NGO developed their working relationship, they established a firm rule: they would not tell Basa what it needed.
Village elders communicate the need. The community helps plan the project, does the work and retains ownership. Basa developed its own school board and utility board, and later a medical clinic. The US foundation primarily raises money, offers advice and vets proposed budgets. Niru Rai's Nepal-based organization works with the village to carry out the plans. The arrangement aims to prevent a culture of dependency.
The community helps plan the project, does the work and retains ownership.
The hydroelectric project made that ownership visible. The US group purchased the parts, including large turbines. Villagers carried the equipment from the end of the road, a journey of four or five days. Mike Miller, a former electrician, traveled with Jeff to advise the community, and a local hydroelectric engineer helped finalize the plans. Basa then built it.
Every person in the village had a job. Even the children carried food to the stream, about half an hour away from the village, where the turbines would be powered. Two villagers went to school to learn how to operate the facility. The community has run it ever since. Outside money supplied capital that subsistence farmers did not have, but it did not replace local judgment, labor or responsibility.
That is the difference between helping and assuming we know what other people need. Outsiders can arrive with a standard plan, build a school in the wrong place, put a bridge where people do not cross or leave equipment that no one has been trained to maintain. Basa's model starts with listening. Money and technical advice support the work, while ownership remains in the village.
Jeff once taught an Oasis class in Indianapolis called Changing Directions in Life. About two-thirds of the participants were women and a third were men, which suggests that the question he confronted at 40 is not confined to one gender. A path that once worked can eventually begin to feel more like a rut.
A rut does not mean the whole life was a mistake. Jeff did not need to erase his legal career, marriage or family to recover what was missing. He needed to recognize that adventure and direct service belonged in his life too. The brochure Alicia placed before him opened one trail, but he had to keep noticing where it led: to mountains, a changed spiritual vocabulary and a village where meaningful service depended on local ownership.