The Book That Found Me
Every journey begins somewhere.
Before the synchronicities.
Before the questions.
Before the discoveries.
There is always a beginning.
The following chapter is presented exactly as it appears in The Book That Found Me and is offered as a complimentary preview for readers who would like to experience the book before purchasing.
If the story resonates with you, the complete book is available in paperback and Kindle editions.
Enjoy Chapter One.
Samuel Rice
Read Chapter One
The Collapse That Became the Beginning
There are moments in life that split existence into two distinct worlds: Before and after. At the time, you do not realize that you are standing on the fault line between two identities. You think you are simply having a bad season, a rough year, a financial setback, a temporary loss. You tell yourself that things will recover and quickly rebuild and that life will return to normal. But sometimes life is not trying to return you to normal. Sometimes it’s trying to introduce you to yourself. I did not certainly didn’t understand that then. At the time, all I knew was that everything I had built was disappearing. Everything that I had worked so hard to create was vanishing day by day.
Before the collapse, I lived a life that many people would have envied. I owned an international custom drapery company that had become highly successful. For years, I lived inside momentum. I traveled constantly. I worked with affluent clients and designed for large luxury residences. My world moved quickly, elegantly, expensively.
I lived on the Atlantic Ocean. Every morning I woke to the sound of waves colliding against the shore with a kind of ancient authority that made human concerns seem small. The ocean was alive and beautiful. Some mornings it was calm and reflective like glass and other mornings it roared with a force that reminded you nature could erase everything you built without even noticing your existence. I loved it. I loved the beauty and the movement. I loved the illusion of certainty.
Money flowed easily then. Or at least it seemed to. I spent freely because I believed the stream would never dry up. Success creates a dangerous kind of hypnosis. It convinces you that the present moment is permanent. It whispers that the structures surrounding you are solid and untouchable.
But life is always shifting beneath the surface and somewhere beyond my awareness, something larger was moving toward me. Even then, beneath all the movement and success, there was another search happening quietly inside me. I had always wanted to understand life at a deeper level. I had always searched for meaning. I wanted to know why we were here and most of all, I wanted to know who I really was beneath accomplishment, the identity and performance, beneath the façade. I simply did not know that life was preparing to answer me and the answer would cost me everything.
It felt as though the universe itself finally spoke and said: “You have always wanted to know who you are. You have always searched for the meaning. Well, now you’re going to find out, and you are going to lose everything to do it.”
At first, the collapse was subtle. In 2008, the financial bubble burst in America. The economy cracked open almost overnight. Businesses began failing everywhere and fear spread across the country like an invisible storm moving from house to house, city to city, industry to industry.
At first, I believed I would survive it untouched. My clients were wealthy, extremely wealthy. I assumed they would continue spending regardless of what was happening in the broader economy.
But loss is relative. If someone has one hundred thousand dollars and loses a third of it, they feel it deeply. If someone has five million dollars and loses a third of it, they feel that too. And slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, people began pulling back. The orders began to slow. Projects paused and the calls stopped coming in.
The luxury industry began collapsing piece by piece. Businesses in custom drapery, interiors, furniture, and high-end design started folding around me one after another. Every week another company vanished. Workrooms folded overnight. Another designer disappeared. A lady designer took a jump off of a twenty-two floor condominium balcony. Things were becoming dire.
I managed to survive longer than many others because I had always resisted creating massive overhead. Something in me believed that businesses should remain lean and manageable. I never wanted unnecessary excess weighing everything down and that instinct bought me time. But only time.
As the months passed, I watched the momentum of my life slowly bleed out. The terrifying thing about collapse is that it rarely happens all at once. It happens day by day. One thing disappears and then another and another. And because it happens gradually, you keep believing you can stop it. You think: I can still fix this. I can still recover. You hope you can still save it. But eventually, you realize you are no longer rebuilding. You are trying to survive.
I began draining my savings simply to stay alive. At first, I told myself it was temporary. A bridge to carry me until I reached safety on the other side. Just enough to get through the downturn. But the downturn kept going, month after month, year after year. And slowly, the life I had built began vanishing in front of me.
The BMW was gone. The ocean condo went into short sale. The business went dark. My beloved pets went to friends who could care for them. Friends disappeared too. That was one of the hardest lessons. Some people love your energy, your lifestyle, your success, your movement , but when the structure collapses, they vanish with it.
By the time 2011 approached, there was almost nothing left. I had reached the point where survival itself felt uncertain. Then my mother suggested something I never imagined I would do. “Move back to Kentucky,” she said. She told me there was a second family home sitting empty in Lexington and I could live there for free until I got back on my feet.
Kentucky. The place I had left behind decades earlier. When I left Kentucky in 1985, I swore to myself that I would never return. I believed my future existed somewhere else. Returning felt like failure, like regression. Like I was giving up. But life has a way of dismantling your pride before rebuilding your soul. I no longer had a choice. So, I packed what little remained of my life and drove back to Kentucky.
I arrived at my parents’ house sometime around two o’clock in the morning in February of 2011. My mother was still awake. She sat watching television coverage of a tsunami that had just devastated parts of Asia. I remember standing there exhausted, emotionally shattered, staring at images of an unstoppable wall of water swallowing entire cities. And I thought how ironic.
The next morning my father handed me the keys to the house in Lexington and that was it. There was no grand speech. No dramatic rescue. Just a quiet handoff into a completely different life. I drove to Lexington feeling like a man who had been hollowed out from the inside. I was emotionally destroyed.
I shook physically from anxiety and fear. My nervous system felt damaged. I could barely think clearly. I had fallen so far from the life I once knew that I no longer recognized myself. I had reached rock bottom and when you truly reach that level, something strange happens. There is nowhere left to fall.
The first few weeks inside that house felt almost unreal. I stayed in bed most of the time with the blinds closed and the lights off. The world outside felt too overwhelming to face. Some days I was almost afraid to stand up. The only light in the room came from a small television glowing faintly at the foot of the bed. That little television became my connection to the outside world while I lay there trying to understand how my entire life had disintegrated.
At the time, it felt like the end of the world. But years later, when I looked back at that period, I saw something entirely different. It was not the end. It was a second birth. I had become like an infant again. Everything I thought I knew about life had been stripped away. Identity. Security. Success. Momentum. Certainty. Everything was gone. And now, I had to relearn how to live. I had to learn how to walk again emotionally, spiritually and mentally. The simplest tasks felt enormous. But each day, I took a few small steps. Then a few more.
And somewhere during that painful rebuilding process, something appeared on my path that would quietly begin changing everything. I discovered an audio program by a man named Craig Beck called The Now Method. It focused on living in the present moment.
At first, I listened simply because I was desperate for relief from my own thoughts. My mind constantly replayed the past, replayed failures, replayed fear, replayed loss. I could not stop mentally traveling backward into grief or forward into terror.
But The Now Method introduced a simple idea that slowly began reshaping me. Life only exists here. In this moment. Now. The past is history and the future is a mystery, but the only true moment is the exact moment we’re in… the now.
And slowly, very slowly, I began learning how to live again through the present moment. Not through ambition. Not through fear or identity, just through now. I began taking walks. I began sitting quietly. I began noticing small things again. Sunlight through a window. The wind moving through gently through the trees. The sound of birds in the morning. Tiny moments that previously would have been drowned beneath noise, movement, and constant striving.
Little by little, I became stronger. Not stronger in the way the world usually measures strength. I wasn’t getting stronger financially or socially. Certainly not professionally. But I was strengthening internally. Something deeper was rebuilding itself beneath the ruins.
At the time, I still believed I had lost everything. What I did not yet understand was this: The collapse was not punishment. It was initiation. The caterpillar believes the dissolution is death. But the butterfly calls it transformation.
Continue the Journey
If you enjoyed Chapter One and would like to continue reading, The Book That Found Me is available now in paperback and Kindle editions.
Some books entertain.
Others leave you seeing life a little differently.
Thank you for spending part of your journey here.