Joshua McAllister was standing in the change room of a concrete plant in British Columbia when he faced life’s biggest question. He was in his mid-twenties, moving through his days without really feeling them. Then, for a moment, he saw where he was. "What am I doing?" he remembers thinking. "Why am I even here?"
"It was like my first glimpse of awareness in a way," he says.
That question didn’t send him hunting for a better job title. It sent him on a years-long walk through desert camps, borrowed vans, mountain cabins, and coastlines, with a working pair of hands and a willingness to follow the next ‘yes.’ Today, he is a spiritual life coach, and his through line is easy to see: he says yes to the adventure, then puts his hands to work wherever it takes him.
It’s the same instinct that carries Santiago, the shepherd in Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist, who trusts that each stop will teach him what he needs, but Joshua's version has more concrete in it.
The Career Plan He Walked Away From
Joshua grew up in Stratford, Ontario, with no idea what he wanted to be. He liked working with wood, singing, and acting. "The system kind of always favored, ‘do something that you like, but also do something that makes you good money,’" he says.
So he chose from a list and enrolled to become a millwright, a machinist who repairs factory equipment. "I just looked at a list that was like all of the different salaries that these different professions could make," he says. "I was like, well, I'm going to pick the one that makes the most money, and that wasn't a vibe."
The hands-on work found him anyway, first at a pre-cast concrete plant in Stratford. At 21, he moved to British Columbia, where his mother offered a tiny cabin on her property. "It's out in the woods, it's away from people," he says. He found the nearest concrete plant and stayed two or three years.
Learning to Live
Around then, Joshua was numbing with various substances more than he was living. "There were just so many things that I was doing that didn't allow me to fully feel my experience," he says. He eventually hit rock bottom, settled a debt he’d incurred from substance abuse, and went back to work, this time making bridge sections at another concrete plant.
Next came wood. He spent about eight months with a local craftsman making high-end cabinets and tables. Between jobs, employment insurance gave him paid time off. "It was in those breaks away from work that I feel like I was actually able to discover myself and really go inwards," he says.
Out of those breaks came a bigger question. "I just remember feeling like, ‘why can't we just build our houses and grow gardens and live in community’?" he recalls. By the end of 2018, he quit carpentry. "I didn't really know what I was going to do," he says.
The Four Year Road Trip
Joshua met a woman at a festival who planted the seed for his next move. "I could really see you on Vancouver Island," she told him. Within seven days, he’d packed as much as he could into his Ford Escape headed that way. "I packed it full because I knew I wasn't coming back," he recalls.
That new friend let him sleep on her couch for a night, then suggested a tent on the coast instead. "I was super scared," Joshua says. "I thought I came here to start a new life on Vancouver Island." He camped for months, sold his car, and hitchhiked down the West Coast with someone else who lived in a van. He ended up in a tent in the desert near Quartzsite, Arizona, where he and a man he'd met built 12 ceremonial rock sites. "That was a pretty profound journey," he says.
That’s where Joshua learned the cost of being so open. "I was in such an open and kind of gullible state that I was like, wow, this could be super real," he says of the man's elaborate stories. When he finally saw how he was being used and deceived, Joshua walked away.
And now for the million dollar question, how did he eat if he wasn’t working all that time?"That's the question that I always get," he says. "I lived in a tent with no money for four and a half years." The answer was community: food banks, friends with enough to share, and produce nearing its end, simmered into soup. "There was always a way to make it work."
Cabins and Drum Circles
Near Mount Shasta, a man he describes as "this master alchemist" invited him to live in a cabin and help tend the land. That’s where Joshua met his wife at a drum circle. "We fell madly in love," he says.
Early in their relationship, they moved to Hawaii for about six months before moving back to Mount Shasta for the home birth of their daughter. From there, they moved to Napa, where Joshua decided to start his coaching business. "I feel like coaching could be the perfect vehicle for me," he says of his unique path and lived experience. He earned a spiritual life coaching certification with 30 to 40 practice hours, above the 25 required.
He continues doing his own inner work, too, with longer breaks from old destructive habits and tai chi almost daily. "I would say that I've taken a complete 180 in my life, and now I have a little two-year-old daughter as well," he says. "I wake up, and I don't feel horrible every single day."
Steal These Moves
Joshua's story is less about the miles than about how he traveled them: open to the next ‘yes’ and to using his hands. If you're at a crossroads of your own, here are three takeaways to carry with you.
Treat your jobs as an education, not a detour. Each job gave Joshua something transferable. Ask what your seemingly unrelated jobs can offer your current or next season.
Say yes, and keep your discernment. His openness led to community, a wife, and a calling, but it also led to someone who took advantage of it. Stay open, and be willing to walk away when it’s time.
Use the pauses. His reflection happened in the gaps between jobs. Downtime may be the thing you need for clarity on your next move.
Where He's Headed Next
"The dream is to have a kind of a self-sustainable farm retreat center," Joshua says of his vision for the future. Regardless of where his path leads next, we know he’ll continue to embrace the adventure and whatever provision it offers. "I think one of the biggest learnings is that the spirit or life always provides," he adds. "Kind of exactly what you need."
You may not have a Ford Escape to pack or a coastline to walk, but you have a next ‘yes,’ and you have your hands. Start there.
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