We were in Borneo, in a restaurant on the side of the road, open to the elements. The rain was hammering the tin roof so hard that conversation had become something you leaned into. The air smelled of grilled fish, wet wood, and cigarettes drifting from another table. And blasting through the speakers was Frank Sinatra. My Way. The waiters sang along as they walked between tables carrying fish and rice, smiling through the rain.

I did it myyyyy waaaay…

I laughed when she said it. Not because it was impossible, but because life with Rani often contains these tiny statements that sound entirely fabricated yet are delivered with absolute certainty. For example, today she told me that Barack Obama had a tattoo.

Still, this one sounded too ridiculous to be true. Frank Sinatra? The song belonged to old men in suits. Cigarettes. Vegas lounges. Fathers getting emotional at weddings. It was the soundtrack of aging masculinity, not of stabbing someone beside a karaoke machine. But Rani only shrugged, as if this were common knowledge.

At moments like this I have a habit. I reach for my phone. A friend once called it bullsh*t bingo. The quiet ritual of checking whether what someone just said has any basis in reality. Not arguing. Not confronting. Just pulling out your phone beneath the table and consulting the invisible referee in the cloud.

It used to be that someone told you something and you’d spend the next weeks asking around to figure out if it was true. It stayed suspended forever between truth and fiction. Now we ask the machine, and the machine answers without hesitation.

So there I sat, rain hammering down in sheets, waiters still singing Sinatra beside me, typing:

Was My Way associated with killings in karaoke bars in Asia?

The answer came back yes. Enough yes that there was a name for it: the My Way Killings. Multiple incidents, mostly in the Philippines, enough that bars reportedly pulled the song from their machines. Articles theorizing about pride, humiliation, alcohol, and the particular danger of a drunk man with a microphone and unresolved emotions.

I looked back at Rani differently. The world was apparently even stranger than I’d imagined.

On this evening I learned that somewhere, sometime, enough men sang I did it my way with enough drunken conviction that an entire region banned it.

And outside, in the middle of Borneo, Sinatra kept echoing through the speakers while the rain fell into the dark.

It’s his birthday lunch. He’s just turned seventy-six, and he’s wearing the gift. A new shirt, with a pocket, exactly the one Rani’s mother asked her to get him. He says something across the table, and Rani turns to me to translate.

“Now that he got the shirt,” she says, “He has to get rid of one of his old ones.”

I look at him, trying to understand the nature of the crisis.

A shirt came in. Therefore a shirt must go out.

Seven shirts. Not six. Not eight. Seven.

This gift was her mother’s idea and it had created a dilemma. He had, at some point in his life, decided that he could only own seven shirts. One of his old shirts, still undecided, needed to be released from active duty. He delivered all of this plainly, and through Rani it reached me ten seconds later.

My first reaction was confusion. Why seven? Why not just have eight?

But the more it settled, the more I felt something closer to envy.

Imagine knowing exactly how many shirts you need. Not approximately. Not “around twenty.” Not “whatever is currently stuffed in the closet.” Exactly seven.

Most of us spend our lives behaving as if one more might finally be enough. One more shirt. One more pair of shoes. One more app to organize the other apps. We buy for versions of ourselves who may never arrive. Our closets become museums of people we thought we were becoming.

And here sat a man, across the lunch table, who had simply walked out of the museum.

What I haven’t shared yet is that a few weeks earlier, I’d been at their house and spilled something on my shirt. He disappeared into the bedroom and came back with one of these seven shirts. I put it on, thanked him, and didn’t think about it again.

I think about it often now.

Because at the time I assumed I was borrowing from a full closet. He had handed me a seventh of everything he owned in that category. It didn’t register as overly generous at the time because I didn’t know. Generosity, it turns out, is a fraction. The fewer you have, the more each one costs to give.

I don’t think seven is sacred. Just a number. A line where desire stops and enough begins. I’ve started to suspect that most of adulthood is just learning where enough lives. Enough money. Enough certainty. Enough shirts. And most of us never find out, because the whole system is built on the promise that enough is always just one thing further away.

PS: I used Google Translate so my parents-in-law could listen to this article and got exactly zero response. Nada. They just looked like sad clowns, wondering why on earth I’d written about this.

I’ve thought about it since. A grown man walks in needing to look important. The person helping him is sixteen and still growing into the suit he’s wearing. I would not trust a kid that age. Somehow I made it work.

My mother put me in drama classes around the same time. I don’t think she meant it as vocational training. That’s what it was. Doing something I’d never done, in a room I had no business being in, while appearing to have done it before. That’s most of what I’ve done since.

Forty years later I’m in Jakarta with nothing much to do, thinking about that kid often. Rani’s work has gotten more prestigious. There are dinners now, events, people who might notice what I’m wearing. My fondness for dressing like a question mark is no longer acceptable.

So I had the bright idea. Let’s get a suit made.

The thought wasn’t profound. But in my mind Indonesia equaled many things, and that day it equaled tailoring for the price of a nice dinner in New York. The kind of suit that back home comes with a salesperson named Blake who calls you “boss” and offers you espresso.

I told Rani that this wasn’t a purchase. It was an experience. A story.

Mayestik, Jakarta’s fabric district, is somewhere between a department store and a labyrinth. Rolls stacked like enormous pastries.

I found it. Gray wool. Soft, serious. The kind of fabric that says, I have opinions.

Then the fitting. If you’ve never been measured in a place where you don’t fully share a language, it’s a particular kind of trust exercise. A stranger wraps tape around your torso while you smile politely and try not to think thoughts like: do I suck it in, or do I leave it where it lives.

They measured everything. Chest, waist, hips, shoulders, arms, and the distance between my collarbone and whatever part of my psyche still believes I’m twenty-five.

Then I chose the style. Italian. Trim. Clean. The quiet confidence that doesn’t need shoulder pads. I showed a picture. This is what I want. We shook hands and I walked away with that rare glow of adulthood done well.

Two weeks later I came back for the fitting where they don’t show you a suit so much as the ghost of one. A pre-suit. A promise. They pinned a few things. It looked big, but big in a way I told myself pins would solve.

Maybe we can trim it down a little? I said it gently, the way you’d tell a barista you asked for oat milk, not whole. They nodded. They smiled. They pinned more. I let it go, because saying it twice would have meant being a man who says it twice.

Then the final fitting. The moment where you fall in love with your suit and become the kind of man who owns a tailored suit.

I stepped into it.

I have never looked more like a clown who had just been promoted.

It was generous. Designed for a man who spends his weekends carrying refrigerators up stairs. I’m not built like a delicate Parisian poet. I’m built like a man who has never declined a meal. This suit took that shape and added a guest room.

And standing there it hit me: of course. I had marched in with my Italian reference photo like a man walking into a local restaurant demanding authentic New York pizza, genuinely believing that if you show someone a picture, the world rearranges itself into your preferences.

I considered asking them to redo it. But it was so far from what it needed to be that “alterations” wasn’t the right word. It would be like asking a painter to fix your portrait when the only accurate part is that you, technically, have a face.

I will never wear it in public. I’ll wear it in private once, in front of a mirror, to remember that for a few hundred dollars I bought a tailored comedy. As far as expensive mistakes go, that’s a bargain.

That’s what I say now.

In the shop I stood there wanting to cry. Rani saw it and didn’t know what to do with me. It’s just a suit. I know how small that is. I’d wanted to give myself one thing, and it wasn’t there.

Not in the “quote it at dinner parties” way. More like a small internal compass that’s been quietly shaping how I see people for most of my life.

The film is Being There.

Peter Sellers. Subtle humor. Almost no action. Long pauses, and a strange, gentle current moving underneath everything. Many people today would watch it and shrug. It’s not paced for us. It doesn’t shout or chase your attention or deliver its meaning in bright, clean sentences. It asks you to sit still long enough to notice what’s happening inside you while you watch.

That’s exactly why it mattered to me.

I saw it young. Too young, probably, to “get it” in any academic sense. And like a lot of things that hit us early, I didn’t understand what I understood. I only knew that it landed. I’m older now, and I think I can finally name what it did: it introduced me to projection before I had the word projection.

The story, on the surface, is almost absurd in its simplicity. A man who has lived a sheltered life as a gardener is suddenly placed into the world of power, money, and influence, and people begin to interpret him as wise. But the real plot isn’t what happens to him. The real plot is what happens to everyone around him.

A simple man speaks plainly, and the people around him translate his simplicity into brilliance. They turn him into what they need him to be. They fill him with meaning he never claimed, and they hear what they were already primed to hear. That’s what has always fascinated me—how much of what we think we’re perceiving is actually our own mind speaking back to us.

We rarely listen to people. We listen to our story about people. We listen to our biases, our hopes, our fears, our hunger for certainty, our need for someone to reassure us that the world makes sense.

The man at the center doesn’t deceive anyone. He doesn’t manipulate or perform. He simply exists, and the world does the rest.

There is something almost unbearable about that once you see it, because it means we’re doing it all the time. We take a few data points and we build a person. Then, without realizing it, we interact with the person we built instead of the one in front of us.

I know exactly when I learned I do this. Years ago I decided, within about ninety seconds, that a new coworker was arrogant. Something in the way he held himself. I spent months relating to that version of him. Polite, guarded, faintly cold. It turned out he’d been terrified the entire time, certain everyone in the building was smarter than he was. I hadn’t been reading him at all. I’d been reading a character I cast in a role and then resented for playing it.

The film doesn’t let you stay above it. It tempts you to project as well. You watch him and start asking the same questions the characters ask. Is he innocent? Is he empty, or some kind of accidental saint? And then you catch yourself: wait, am I doing it right now?

That’s what good art does. It doesn’t tell you the lesson. It sets a trap for your mind and then shows you your own footprints.

And of course there’s that final scene. The pond. He walks out toward the water, and the film gives you a moment almost too quiet for what it implies. Is he walking on water, or is it a trick of perspective? A miracle, or one last joke on the audience designed to test how badly we want to turn him into something more than he is? The movie refuses to answer. It just watches you watching.

When I think about why this film lodged in me so early, I think it’s because it handed me one of the most useful questions a person can carry: What am I adding to what I’m seeing? Not what is happening. Not what is true. What am I adding?

So when people tell me they don’t find Being There that interesting, I don’t argue. The point for me was never just entertainment. It’s one of those rare films that doesn’t demand your attention with fireworks.

Some things don’t hit you because they’re exciting. They hit you because they’re true. And sometimes you only understand what you saw the first time when you come back to it years later, carrying enough of your own footprints to finally recognize them on the screen.

I recorded a conversation about it with Bambos for our podcast A Wonderful Chaos, and I share it here.

Jakarta makes me restless. So I invent things. A destination, a distance, a reason to be out of the apartment. That day the reason was the coast. Everyone had told me there was nothing at the coast. But every coast is interesting.

I told Rani I was walking there.

“Do you know how far that is?”

“It’s fine. I’ll make it.”

“It’s four hours from here.”

“Not if I leave early enough.”

There are no sidewalks. What looks like one is a row of concrete slabs laid over the gutter. They can be lifted, and sometimes they have been and not put back. Sometimes they’re cracked, or tilted, or gone, and you’re looking down into the drainage running under the street. So you adjust. One step on the road, one step on something that might hold. At night the rats move through it with confidence, using the edges as if they’d been designed for them. You, meanwhile, are improvising.

Along the way there are little makeshift villages. Alleys folding into dense clusters of homes, corrugated steel marking boundaries that felt temporary and weren’t. Mud. Water mixing to create a pathway. You commit to a direction, follow it a while, and hit a wall, a house, a narrowing that simply stops. Backtrack. Try the next opening. Sometimes it gets you closer to a street. Sometimes it delivers you to the same wall from the other side.

Tourists don’t come to Jakarta. The ones who do don’t walk. And nobody, having decided to walk, walks through here.

So the people I passed looked at me as if I were an alien. Not unkindly. Just openly, without pretending otherwise. Children stopped what they were doing. Adults paused mid-conversation. I’ve been a foreigner for thirty-five years. Smile, wave, keep moving.

About an hour in, Google Maps routed me through a cemetery. I’d been to one before with Rani, so I knew what happens if you stop. You pay people to keep you company while you visit your dead. I didn’t have any dead here. I didn’t stop. I walked at a pace I hoped read as purposeful, because people had started to follow — not closely, not quickly, matching me, waiting.

Four hours in I reached the northern coast, though “coast” is generous. What I reached was the long aftermath of one. Rusted hulls, deteriorating concrete pilings, cranes that had stopped some time ago and weren’t planning a comeback. I stood there a while, having arrived.

Then I heard music. Faint, repetitive, familiar. So I followed it to a wall, and behind the wall was something that looked like a castle, if a castle had been assembled from chicken wire, plaster, and a willingness to overlook details. I walked until I found the entrance.

An amusement park. People looked, smiled, pointed, and looked away the moment I noticed. It’s a place for people under fifty who came with someone. I went in.

And then a ride. An unmistakable imitation of It’s a Small World. Not inspired by it. Committed to it. Faithful in every respect except upkeep, which had been abandoned around the time I left the US. No line. No one waiting, no one leaving. Just the boats going around on a current you could have outwalked.

I loved it immediately.

I’d paid at the gate, so there was nothing left to buy. There was a man, and he did not acknowledge me. He didn’t wave me on. He didn’t look up. I got in the boat.

I reached over the sides and pulled, the way you would in a canoe, except there was nowhere to be. I did it a few times before figuring out that it made no difference. The boat had its own timeline.

The music was loud, and slightly off, and had long ago forgotten where it was supposed to end. The first stretch was Indonesia. Region after region, each with its own costumes. Then the rest of the world, in categories. A general idea of Africa. A general idea of the Middle East. No principle I could detect, no order, just whatever came next to whoever was building it. The animatronics, when they worked, moved without enthusiasm. When they didn’t you could see everything — the metal frame where a face used to be implied, an arm that lifted halfway and reconsidered.

Somewhere between two Indonesian provinces I couldn’t tell apart, I ran the numbers. Four hours of walking. Air I’d been advised against. A cemetery I’d hurried through. All of it to arrive here, alone, hand-paddling through a plaster country while a song I didn’t like played from a speaker I couldn’t find.

I kept paddling.

Then the whole thing gave up. Clowns. No transition, no explanation, just clowns, as if someone had reached the end of the world and filled the rest with what was in the shed. After the clowns, a circus, because once you’ve accepted clowns escalation is the only direction left.

It was the best thing I had seen in months.

Then it ended. I stepped off. No one got on. The man didn’t look up.

Rani told me later she had a school outing there thirty-five years ago.

I took a taxi home. An hour in the dark, half asleep, wading through the traffic I’d spent the day walking past.

Right now I am lying down, speaking into my phone. This is how most of these begin. Sometimes I’m in the sauna. Sometimes I’m on a long walk. The message runs eight minutes, ten. I already have the story in my head — I’m just working through it out loud, the way you’d tell it to a friend who isn’t interrupting.

Then I leave it as a draft in my inbox. There are about sixty of them sitting there now. Some are a month old, some are a lot longer. When I come back to one, I read through it, check that the details are right — who was there, what was actually said — and then I work it over. Some get flourished. Some get funnier. Some never make it out at all.

The working-over is done with AI. I like knowing how things get made, so I’ll tell you how this one does.

Here is my honest relationship with the thing: I love it and it scares me. I love the immediate feedback. I love that I can iterate quickly, try a sentence three ways in the time it used to take me to doubt one. It has become, of all things, a way of journaling — I encounter something, I process it out loud, I shape it, and on Thursdays I share it. The joy is mine first. Some of you get it secondhand.

It scares me for almost the same reasons. It’s quick. The insights that are so quickly and easily shared are not necessarily earned. I see it in the software developers I know, watching their own field move under them. I see it in my editor, a man who never once considered using AI, now figuring out how he will.

Take last week’s post, “Concentrated Regret.” It happened. I had dinner. The two men across the table exist, and before the essay went out I sent it to them, and they read it and recognized the evening. That’s my fact-check. Nothing in this or other pieces is made up. This is a practice, not a product.

If my life is anything, it is transparent, so none of this has ever felt like something to hide. It’s just how this work gets made.

But I also understand that for some people, AI in the mix is the whole story. I have friends who are firmly anti-AI, and I love them. If it makes this uncomfortable to read, I understand — skip it, no hard feelings. I’m not looking to create a platform for debate. This has always been about vulnerability, about staying conscious of what’s going on in myself. Life is short and there’s plenty else to read. I’ve got several books that were written without AI.

For the rest of you — the ones who figure AI is part of life now, and the question is only whether we use it in ways that bring meaning or ways that hollow it out — I’ll be here Thursday. There are sixty drafts in the inbox. One of them is about to get lucky.

P.S. I spent the week in Bali, somewhere I first knew in 1992. I’m still deciding how I feel about that for another post. I flew my drone. Here it is.

I had a client visiting Amsterdam this week, and because another friend of ours happened to be in town for the first time in seven years, I thought it would be nice to arrange dinner. A simple dinner. The kind where people eat fish, exchange stories, nod politely at each other’s lives, and return home at a reasonable hour feeling slightly more connected than before.

One of the men is our accountant. He’s the sort of person who is entirely comfortable in his own skin, including the small but respectable belly that suggests a healthy relationship with bread and the absence of unnecessary suffering. He has no interest in being impressed. You could serve him soup from a thermos beside a motorway and he would simply say, “Very nice,” and continue with his evening completely fulfilled.

Because of this, I scheduled the dinner early. Six o’clock. Efficient. Civilized. In my mind, we would be done by seven-thirty.

The restaurant specialized in fish. I hadn’t been there in seven years myself, but I remembered it being pleasant. What I apparently did not remember was that the restaurant no longer served meals so much as it staged a slow-moving conceptual performance about seafood scarcity.

The waiter handed us the menu, and I immediately noticed something unsettling.

There was no à la carte option.

Only a choice between five, six, or seven courses.

This felt less like ordering dinner and more like selecting a subscription package.

Before any actual food appeared, we were served tea. Not normal tea. The pot was metal, hand-forged, and looked as though it had been carried down from a mountainside in Japan by a man who only speaks in whispers. The cups were ceramic. The whole arrangement appeared more expensive than several meals I’d eaten that month.

The tea was infused with seaweed.

And it was at that exact moment I knew we were in trouble.

Because seaweed tea is not the opening act of a quick fish dinner. Seaweed tea is a warning flare. It says: “You are no longer eating for nourishment. You are about to participate in an experience.”

The first course arrived on a plate approximately the size of a satellite dish. In the center sat something that may once have had contact with a shrimp. Around it were three decorative droplets arranged with the seriousness of a museum installation.

We ate it in roughly fourteen seconds.

Then came the second course. A small piece of salmon had been compressed into a shape suggesting regret, accompanied by what the waiter described as a reduction. Less than a teaspoon of it. Whatever it had once been — wine, fennel, the tears of a smaller fish — had been boiled down until only its memory remained.

This, it turned out, was the theme of the evening.

Every course was a reduction of something. You never quite felt you were eating. You were sampling the residue of food. A teaspoon of concentrated essence beside a forkful of carefully arranged protein. By the fourth plate, I began wondering if the chef’s true passion wasn’t cooking at all, but evaporation.

I glanced at the accountant. He was studying his plate with the calm bewilderment of a man who has just been handed a parking ticket in a language he doesn’t speak. He took the half-teaspoon of reduction onto his fork, examined it, ate it, and said, “Very nice.”

The evening stretched onward.

One scallop. One smoked something. One leaf standing vertically for reasons known only to modern gastronomy. Each accompanied by its own carefully evaporated companion.

At some point the meal stopped being something we were eating and became something that was happening to us.

Outside, Amsterdam moved through its evening naturally. Boats crossed canals. People lived entire lives. Somewhere, children were likely conceived and born between courses four and five.

Meanwhile, we remained there, politely chewing microscopic arrangements beneath dim lighting.

And yet, strangely, it became hilarious.

Because once you surrender to the absurdity of something, it transforms. The frustration dissolves and what remains is the story itself. Three men who wanted a quick fish dinner somehow trapped inside a three-and-a-half-hour tasting menu they never knowingly agreed to.

The best course of the evening turned out to be dessert. Not because it was extraordinary, but because it was simple: a cheese plate. Honest. Direct. No reductions. No splattering. Just cheese quietly fulfilling its purpose in life.

The accountant looked at it, nodded once, and ate it like a man who had finally come home.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

He smiles when he says it, and the smile is the thing I keep coming back to — not the practiced smile of a man repeating a script three times a day, but a man who still can’t quite believe he gets to do this for a living. He has done it hundreds of times. I spend the afternoon trying to understand why he keeps coming back.

We meet him inside a small hut at the base of the volcano, something between a ski lodge and a work station. Wet boots line the entrance. Harnesses hang from hooks. Helmets with mounted lights are stacked beside heavy jackets and climbing gear. Outside, black lava fields stretch toward the horizon under a gray Icelandic sky. He’s fit, somewhere in his sixties, weathered in that way where people seem carved by wind rather than aged by time.

The volcano is called Þríhnúkagígur — the only one in the world where human beings can descend directly into the magma chamber itself. It last erupted roughly 4,000 years ago. Unlike almost every other volcano on earth, its chamber never collapsed inward afterward. The magma simply drained back into the earth, leaving a vast hollow space inside the mountain. Scientists still aren’t sure how. One volcanologist described it as though somebody had pulled the plug.

He was one of the first people ever lowered into it, decades ago, on one of the teams that mapped the chamber after Icelandic cave explorer Árni B. Stefánsson first entered it in 1974. No elevator. No safety system. No tourism. Just ropes hanging into the dark, and no certainty about how stable any of it was. He mentions this the way another man might mention fixing a fence.

Now the descent runs on what’s honestly a glorified window-washing machine. Every winter the whole lowering structure is pulled out and flown back by helicopter when the season reopens. Metal beams bolted into rock, rubber wheels scraping the narrowest parts of the shaft, an open cable lift over the darkness with a thin canopy overhead in case rocks fall. Nothing about it feels polished enough to let you forget you are being lowered into a volcano. Which, somehow, makes it better.

At the edge, Jason looks down into the shaft, laughs once, and goes quiet. He’s the friend you want on a trip like this — game for anything — and also the one doing the structural math on the cable while he laughs. Nobody fills the silence. We clip in. The platform takes our weight with a small lurch and starts down.

Mist inside the shaft makes the depth impossible to judge. Lights far below glow upward through the fog. The cage sways. Metal creaks. At certain points the walls come close enough to touch, and my hand moves to the rail before I’ve decided to reach for it. I say I hope it holds. Jason says he hopes there’s a redundancy. Then he tells me about the flying dinner — the kind where they hoist the whole table into the air on cables — and how one of the wires broke while he was up there. He’s somewhere else for a second, back in that moment. The irrational thoughts arrive on schedule — what if it erupts now, what if the cable goes — and then I remember the chamber has stood for four thousand years and these men have done this hundreds of times. It doesn’t help. Neither of us stops bracing the whole way down.

Nearly four hundred feet. And then the walls fall away on every side and we are standing inside it.

Nobody speaks. The first thing is the size — the way the dark opens out far past the reach of the lights, so the chamber feels less like a cave than the inside of a cathedral that burned and cooled and was forgotten. The air is colder and still, and it holds sound strangely; a dropped word travels and comes back changed. Then the colors arrive as my eyes adjust. Burnt orange and copper. Yellow sulfur bleeding down the rock. Indigo in the shadows, black volcanic streaks running through the stone like smoke that got trapped on its way out. It looks like standing inside the earth while it remembers being liquid.

He lets us stand in it a while. Then he starts pointing — this seam, that overhang, the place the rope used to hang. He has seen all of it thousands of times and he is still looking up while he speaks.

The risk has gone routine for him. The wonder hasn’t. That’s the part I can’t square, watching him study the rock he’s known for decades.

On the way up I ask how many more times he thinks he’ll go down. He shrugs, still looking past me at the colors. “Until I can’t,” he says.

He’s our ATV guide, and for nearly three hours he’s been taking us through the volcanic landscape around Grindavík, Iceland. It’s a place the brain struggles to process. Mars-like. Barely a tree in sight. Black lava fields layered over lava fields layered over lava fields, each eruption built atop the last until time itself becomes hard to measure.

At first it all blends together. Then your eyes adjust. Some lava is older, softened under thick green moss; other stretches look sharp and fresh, almost violent, as though the earth was ripped open yesterday. Which, in many cases, it nearly was.

I drove into Grindavík for the first time a few days earlier. It was once a fishing town of nearly 4,000 people. Today only a fraction remain. Most left after the volcanic activity escalated in late 2023, when thousands of earthquakes began shaking the Reykjanes Peninsula and scientists realized magma was moving directly beneath the town.

The earth began splitting open. Streets cracked apart. Fissures stretched through neighborhoods. In places the ground shifted so dramatically that one side of the road now sits visibly lower than the other. Oliver points this out casually while driving, saying, ”Now I drive downhill when I return home from work.”

Then the eruptions came. First in December 2023. Then again, and again.

By the time we arrive, the region feels like it’s holding its breath. Scientists estimate that enormous volumes of magma continue accumulating beneath the nearby Svartsengi system. Pressure builds underground while the town waits.

That’s the strange part — the waiting. Grindavík doesn’t feel dead. It feels suspended, like one of those films where the population vanished overnight, except the streets are real, the houses are real, the silence is real.

The Icelandic government eventually offered residents roughly 95% of their homes’ assessed value to leave. And so the houses remain. Many still look newly built; some families had moved in only days before the evacuation orders. Curtains still hang in windows. Toys sit in gardens. Entire neighborhoods feel paused mid-sentence.

The air itself feels hostile. Sulfur drifts through the town, that acidic volcanic smell reminding you the danger isn’t theoretical. It’s underneath you, breathing through the cracks.

And somehow, in the middle of all this, tourism continues. That’s where the surreal tips into something close to dystopian. A luxury hotel still operates nearby. Tourists soak in geothermal spas. Cocktails get served. People take selfies. Empty residential streets sit minutes away.

Massive defensive walls now cut across the landscape, built to protect the geothermal power plant and the Blue Lagoon resort. Billions of krona have gone into barriers designed to redirect lava if another eruption comes.

Oliver laughs about it, but there’s an edge under the laugh. “The whole town evacuates,” he says, “but not the luxury hotel.”

He’s from the UK, though he’s lived here long enough to take it personally. And what he feels isn’t resignation — it’s the sense of a real injustice. The barriers, the billions, the cocktails being served while families sit locked out of homes they’ll likely never return to. The volcano doesn’t choose who it spares. People do.

As we ride toward the coast, the land grows more otherworldly still. Black lava reaches all the way to the ocean and simply stops at the water’s edge. We stop where the rock meets the water, and for a long moment nobody says anything. It’s beautiful out here, in the way that has nothing to do with comfort. A place that reminds you how briefly any of us stay.

It’s the kind of work I’ve done many times. Straightforward on paper.

But something has been happening that I didn’t expect.

When people ask what I’m doing here and I tell them, I keep noticing the same reaction. A wince. A small charge. A flicker of something defensive that passes across the face before the words come.

And then, almost always, a story.

One woman told me about walking into a bathroom and finding a man there. Another person told me about an LGBTQ+ club at a local school whose posters kept getting torn down. Small stories. Quiet ones. But each one carrying a pulse of fear underneath — the kind that sits in the body and waits to be asked.

I kept thinking, I know this feeling. I’ve seen this before.

And then I realized where.

From a young age, I had a lot of friends who later turned out to be gay. So many, in fact, that one of my first girlfriends sat me down one afternoon and gently asked if I was sure I wasn’t secretly gay and simply hadn’t admitted it yet.

I told her I was sure.

She did not seem convinced. And honestly, if you looked at the data, she had a point. My taste in music, my taste in friends, and my taste in socks all pointed in a direction I was not, in fact, going.

But it was never about sexuality. It was about character.

I was drawn to people who had already been through something. People who had been rejected. People who didn’t quite fit the template. The ones who had to build a spine before most of us even knew we needed one.

In the 80s, being gay was not what it is now. It wasn’t neutral or celebrated or wrapped in rainbow branding. It was risky. It meant you were different in a way that could cost you something — family, belonging, safety. And I think, unconsciously, I was drawn to the people who had already confronted that cost.

One friend recently reminded me of something I had forgotten. He transferred into my high school sophomore year. Flamboyant. Not officially out yet, but very clearly himself, comfortable in a way that most 16-year-olds are not, and that most 40-year-olds still aren’t. At one school event, he did the full Risky Business underwear dance on stage. Fully committed. Fully exposed. Fully unbothered by whatever anyone might project onto him.

I remember watching him and feeling anxious.

Not because he was gay.

Because he was free.

And at that age, I wasn’t. I told him once, years later, that I admired him but wasn’t brave enough to stand that close to the fire. So we stayed friends, but we kept a little distance. I still needed the safety of the majority.

But not everyone I knew was that visible. Some carried it in complete silence.

Years later, when I was living in Vienna — a city where people can go an entire dinner without telling you anything true about themselves, and often do — a letter arrived from my college roommate.

We had lived together. We had been close in the way young men are close when they haven’t yet learned how to name anything. I thought I knew him.

I did not know him. I didn’t even know I didn’t know him, which is a particular kind of not knowing.

The letter told me he was gay. And that he had a crush on me the entire time we lived together. And had never said a word. To me. To anyone. It also told me how his parents had responded. They could not accept it, and they were pushing him toward counseling — toward being talked out of the thing he had finally said out loud.

I read it and sat with it for a long time. Then I picked up the phone and called him.

We talked for a long time. There was no scramble to reframe the past, no careful re-editing of shared memories — just two people who had known each other for years finally having the conversation one of us hadn’t been able to have at the time.

The only thing I remember saying with any force was about that. His parents were still pressing. I told him: you’ve waited twenty-five years to finally reach this point. Please don’t go back.

What struck me most wasn’t the revelation. It was the silence that had preceded it.

He had lived next to me, eaten meals with me, talked about girls with me, walked across campus with me — and carried something enormous that he could not say out loud. Not because I would have rejected him. Because the world around us had already taught him, long before we met, that some things had to stay buried to survive. His own parents had just proven the lesson correct.

That is the part that stays with me. Not that he was gay. That he was alone in it. And whatever was in the air that told him to stay silent, I had been breathing it too.

People conflate sexuality and character, as if being gay says something essential about a person’s moral structure. It doesn’t. But surviving rejection does. There is a muscle that only builds when standing in your truth costs you something — internal muscle, the kind that doesn’t show on the outside but carries you through life.

When I zoom out, I realize my life has been shaped by people who had to build themselves. And maybe that says more about me than it does about them. Maybe somewhere in me, I was trying to do the same. Or maybe standing near them let me borrow a courage I wasn’t yet willing to pay for myself.

And maybe that’s also why I’m in Cleveland this week. Why I keep noticing the wince. Why I keep listening for the story underneath it.

Because somewhere in me, I am still that young man in Vienna, holding a letter, wishing my friend had not had to wait so long to say it — and wondering what it was about the room, and about me, that made him think he had to.

This year, that meant Borneo.

A reddish-brown river. A slow boat. Orangutans somewhere upstream.

Indonesia is not short on strange and wonderful adventures, but one of the more famous is the river cruise through the jungle to the orangutan feeding stations. The whole area is a rehabilitation and conservation zone, built largely because the palm oil industry spent decades flattening the rainforest. The forest shrank. The orangutans got squeezed into smaller and smaller pockets. So conservation groups stepped in and started feeding them.

Our guide told us there are around 4,000 orangutans in the region and about twenty feeding stations. Tourists get to see three.

Each station has scheduled feeding times. Almost like showtimes.

The first one was astonishing.

We stood behind a rope while twenty or so orangutans came down out of the canopy. Some swung in with impossible grace. Others moved like old men getting out of bed. One by one they made their way to the platform where someone had laid out bananas and sweet potatoes.

The first to arrive was Roger.

Roger is the alpha. Forty-two years old, enormous, relaxed, and fully aware that everything here revolves around him. Nobody eats before Roger eats. Even among orangutans, there’s a hierarchy.

What got me wasn’t his power. It was how unbothered he was by us. He looked at the crowd the way a landlord looks at tenants who play music too loud — mildly irritated, completely unsurprised.

Our guide was named Darmin, which I only remembered because I kept calling him “Darwin” in my head. He’d been doing this for fifteen years and had mastered the rare skill of guiding without over-guiding. Some guides narrate nature so hard you never actually see it. Darmin knew when to talk and when to shut up.

He gave us facts in small doses.

Humans and orangutans share about 97% of their DNA.

They live forty to fifty years.

Females give birth maybe once every five years.

The word orangutan comes from orang hutan — “forest person.”

After watching them for a while, that name feels about right.

They’re not human. But there’s something familiar in them that’s hard to shake. The slow movements. The stillness. The way they sit and stare into the middle distance like they’re thinking about unpaid taxes or a relationship that didn’t work out. One scratched itself lazily. Another looked deeply offended that someone had taken its spot near the fruit.

At some point it stopped feeling like watching wildlife and started feeling like crashing a family reunion.

But underneath the wonder, there was something else.

Something a little strange.

The whole thing runs on near-perfect choreography. Every boat takes the same route at almost the same time. Long wooden double-deckers — gorgeous in photos, apparently held together by optimism and wet plywood — drift up the river one behind the other. At each station they pile into floating traffic jams. Tourists file off, walk the same wooden paths, stand behind the same ropes, and wait for the same ritual.

It’s eco-tourism. It’s also weirdly industrial.

A wilderness experience with line management.

The story we like to tell ourselves about travel is that we’re out discovering something untouched. Something personal. Something that’s going to change us. The actual experience is usually less cinematic than that — a few hundred people funneled through the same path, taking nearly identical photos, each of us quietly casting ourselves as the explorer.

And yet.

Something real still happens anyway.

That’s the part I can’t resolve. Even inside all the machinery, the orangutans are still genuinely moving. Watching Roger come down out of the trees is breathtaking, even knowing one hundred people saw it yesterday and one hundred more will see it tomorrow.

I caught myself framing photos to cut out the crowds. Lone orangutan. Hanging on a vine. Silence. Pictures that made it look solitary and sacred.

Then I caught myself wanting the opposite shot.

The boats jammed together.

The crowd behind the rope.

The performance of wilderness, with all its seams showing.

Because the truth of the trip was sitting somewhere between those two pictures the whole time. The real moment and the manufactured one, right next to each other, refusing to cancel each other out.

The full trip video with all the unnecessary bits cut out.

I want to talk about a song. Quite possibly my favorite song ever.

It came out a year before I was born, which feels oddly perfect — like it was sitting on a shelf somewhere, waiting for me to catch up. Joni Mitchell’s Both Sides Now.

I have no memory of the first time I heard it. I’m sure it drifted past me a hundred times before I noticed — in a film, in a store, in somebody’s apartment while I was looking for the bathroom. But somewhere in my twenties I actually heard it. Not just heard it. Felt it. A kind of melancholy I couldn’t place. Not sadness about a particular thing. The recognition of something true that I didn’t yet have language for.

It’s one of those rare songs that, the second it starts, my whole system changes. I drop into humility. Into a kind of surrender I don’t usually access on demand. I am, briefly, a better person. Then it ends and I go back to being whoever I was before.

The song is about clouds. And then it isn’t. Same clouds, seen from two different lives. That’s the whole move. Joni does it in four minutes.

The place I notice it most clearly in myself is when I’m judging. Not dramatically. In the small, everyday tightening that happens when I decide I already know what something means. I’ve come to think of judgment as a signal flare. It almost always means there’s a layer of complexity I’m not willing to look at yet. Or that I just don’t have the capacity for it in the moment. Either way, the flare goes up.

This is where my father comes in.

For years, I held him with a lot of judgment. Not because I was trying to be unkind. Because I couldn’t yet see him in the full complexity of his own struggle. He was bipolar. And when you grow up inside that, you don’t have the eyes — or the emotional bandwidth — to hold the whole picture. So you do what young minds do. You compress the story. You make it manageable. You decide which parent is the hard one and which parent is the safe one, and you file everything under those two headings, and you do not revisit the filing system for about twenty-five years.

The moment I remember most clearly is the one I spent years calling the worst day of my life.

I was leaving America to travel for a year. The real reason was that I wanted to be with my girlfriend in Switzerland. I was too scared to tell him that. I knew how it would land. So I told him a smaller version of the truth, and eventually the full version came out the way full versions always do.

He broke. He gave me thirty minutes to get everything I owned out of his house.

He told me I was dead to him. Out of the will. That he never wanted to speak to me again.

I filed it under cruelty. Under rejection. Under this is who he is. I carried it that way for a long time.

What I couldn’t see then — what took me years to see — was that it wasn’t cruelty. It was fear. Fear for me. Fear of losing me. Fear of a world he couldn’t reach into and protect me from. Fear that came out sideways and loud and final because he didn’t have another language for it, and because the illness he lived inside didn’t let him slow it down long enough to find one.

He wasn’t trying to end us. He was trying to hold on. He just did it with the only tools he had, and those tools were on fire.

I couldn’t see that at twenty. I could only see the thirty minutes. The boxes. The door.

The clouds, from one side.

It took me a long time to look again. And when I did, he was still the same man. Same moment. Same words. But the meaning had changed. Not because I rewrote the past. Because I was finally able to hold more of it at once.

And then the song does the thing great art does. It doesn’t end with a triumphant conclusion. It ends with an honest bow. Even with age, even with experience, even with perspective — we’re still not seeing the whole picture. We can look from both sides and still not fully grasp it.

That’s the part I love. It doesn’t resolve life. It respects it. It lets it stay complicated.

I still don’t really know clouds at all.

Both Sides Now on YouTube, Joni Mitchell

Somewhere along the way that changed. By my thirties, my birthday had become a mature inconvenience — another date to acknowledge politely, like daylight savings or a dentist appointment. I developed the habit of minimizing it. If someone asked what I was doing, I’d say, “Nothing special,” and I wore that sentence like a badge.

Then Facebook arrived and ruined my philosophy.

Suddenly hundreds of people were wishing me happy birthday, many of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. At first it felt ridiculous. Then, unexpectedly, it felt nice — not because the messages were deep, but precisely because they weren’t. Most were the digital equivalent of a nod in the hallway. And it turned out that being remembered casually, by people with no particular reason to remember you, lands differently than being remembered deeply. It asks nothing of you. It just says: you’re still here, and someone noticed.

That was the first crack in my anti-birthday identity. The second was almost embarrassingly obvious: I could make the day whatever I wanted. There was no birthday committee deciding how meaningful it was allowed to be. If the day felt ordinary, it was because I had decided it was ordinary.

I’d been reading about existentialism around then — the wonderfully uncomfortable philosophy that took hold after World War II, when the world no longer felt particularly trustworthy. Its core idea is that life has no inherent meaning, and that this is not a tragedy but an invitation. So I did something out of character.

I started telling people it was my birthday. Not in a needy way. Just casually. “It’s my birthday today.”

People smiled. They asked questions. Conversations opened that never would have otherwise, and strangers became temporary friends. The day felt lighter, more alive — not because anything extraordinary had happened, but because I’d given it permission to matter.

That was the year my birthday stopped being a date and started being a choice.

Later, life added a twist almost too on-the-nose to be real. June 11th isn’t only my birthday. It’s also my wife Rani’s. Out of all the days in the year, we landed on the same one. And once again, instead of treating it as coincidence, we decided to give it meaning.

So we got married on our birthday.

Which means today is not only my 56th birthday and Rani’s 49th. It’s our birthday. And it’s our nine-year anniversary. Three reasons to celebrate, stacked on the same square of the calendar — not because fate demanded it, but because at some point we realized we were allowed to make life more meaningful simply by deciding it was.

This year we’re celebrating in the Borneo rainforest, walking through wet heat and the racket of insects to find orangutans in the canopy. If the day is going to matter, it might as well matter in a jungle.

So today I’m not minimizing anything. It’s my birthday. It’s Rani’s birthday. It’s our anniversary. It’s June 11th, in the middle of a forest. And the only reason it feels special is that I finally stopped pretending it wasn’t.

PS: As I read this to Rani, she said, “God gave you another year. Make it count.” So that’s the plan — a forest, an anniversary, and for twenty-four hours, two main characters.

It was his birthday, and I was excited. Not just because I like London, but because I like him. He’s one of those painfully conscious people. Not conscious in the crystals-and-breathwork sense, but conscious of others. The kind of person who lowers his voice in hotel hallways. The kind of person who apologizes when someone else bumps into him. On the train ride there, every time my phone rang, I got up and walked between the cars to talk, swaying beside the rubber accordion wall while Europe blurred past. I felt very European. I felt like a man who could be trusted with a small dog.

Then came the trip home.

Halfway through Belgium, I remembered a meeting I was supposed to facilitate. A workshop, actually. On inclusive communication. Naturally, this realization arrived at the exact moment the train stopped because of “animals on the track” — though in my mind it was a single cow. I preferred the cow. I named her Margriet. I imagined her standing in the path of international transit with the calm of a creature who had thought things through. Margriet had read the timetables. Margriet had concerns.

By this point, many passengers had gotten off. The car had become beautifully sparse, and — being a considerate person, or so I believed — I left my friend in our seats and moved to the middle of the train, as far from any other human as I could get. From where I sat, there were six empty rows in every direction. It seemed, by any reasonable standard, like a private office.

I put on my noise-canceling headphones, which I almost never use, and joined the meeting.

In my mind, everything was ideal. The train noise disappeared. The world became soft and muted. I imagined I was speaking at a perfectly acceptable volume — the volume of a man discussing inclusive communication.

What I did not realize was that I was apparently delivering it like a sermon to the back pews.

Meanwhile, my friend sat frozen in our original seats, slowly converting into a houseplant.

About ten minutes in, a single text arrived:

It wasn’t a cow. It was animals.

That was his contribution. His entire contribution. Not you are screaming. Not the man two rows down has stood up twice. Just a zoological correction, issued with the gravity of a man preserving the historical record. I read it and thought, Well, he must be able to hear me, since he’s keeping me informed. I gave him a thumbs up. I returned to the workshop. We were now discussing how to create space for quieter voices.

Later he told me people on the other side of the train — people I couldn’t even see — were shouting things like “Shut up!” and “Close it down!” Once, I noticed a man stand and gesture in my direction, and I waved back, assuming he had recognized me from somewhere. A woman walked the length of the car and I thought, How nice, she’s stretching her legs. She was, in fact, going to find the conductor.

And my friend? He said nothing.

He simply sat there, angling his body toward the window, developing a sudden and intense interest in the safety card. At one point he was, I now realize, pretending to be Belgian.

A row away from me sat a woman reading a self-help book — something with a floral cover, the kind of cover that promises gentle transformation, soft mornings, the slow reclaiming of one’s energy. She had a highlighter. She was the picture of a woman doing the work. I noticed her only in passing as I sat down, and then forgot her entirely.

I would meet her again later.

When the meeting ended, I packed up my headphones, stood, and walked back through the car to collect our luggage, pleased with myself in the way one is pleased after a productive afternoon. That was when I passed her. She lifted her eyes from her book — though I now suspect she had not been reading it for some time — and gave me a look so scalding that I felt it land somewhere behind my ribs. The book was open. The highlighter was uncapped. Whatever she had been reclaiming, I had taken it from her.

And still, I didn’t fully understand.

What struck me later was how absurdly avoidable the whole thing was.

If he had food in his teeth, I would tell him.

If he had toilet paper stuck to his shoe, I would tell him.

If he unknowingly smelled like a dead raccoon in July, I would gently pull him aside and say, “Listen. We need to discuss some things.”

But instead, he let me continue, the way you might let a man walk into a glass door if you were curious about the sound it would make.

And honestly, that’s what made it funny.

Because had I known in the moment, I would have died of embarrassment. But not knowing allowed me to move through the entire disaster with total joy. I was happy. Productive. Pleased with myself. I had facilitated.

He told me about it on the platform at Amsterdam Centraal, the moment we stepped off the train. And he was not calm. He had been biting his tongue for an hour and it was all coming out at once — the shouting, the woman, the gesturing man, the way he had considered, briefly, getting off in Brussels and starting a new life. He spoke quickly, with the restless energy of a man who had been compressed for too long and was now expanding back into his original shape. I had not seen him like this very often. He was almost vibrating.

I have thought about it often since. Not the meeting. Not the woman. The hour he sat there, choosing, every minute, not to tell me.

I wonder how many people in my life are doing this right now. Sitting beside me. Choosing.

I recently visited the Warner Bros. Studio Tour in London, where much of the Harry Potter film series was shot — and where, apparently, they’re now filming the new one. It’s the kind of place that sells butterbeer in three sizes and has a gift shop roughly the size of a village. There’s plenty to say about the sets, the detail, the sheer scale of it all. That’s not really what stayed with me.

What stayed with me was my own reaction to being there, which was not the reaction I had expected.

I saw the first Harry Potter film in a cinema in Vienna with a group of friends, and I remember walking out with an oddly heavy feeling. Not because the movie was bad. Because I realized I’d have to wait years to see what happened next. It felt unreasonable, as if the universe had introduced me to something wonderful and then immediately enforced a waiting period.

Over the years the films became something else entirely. Not something I watched — somewhere I went. If I’m not feeling well, if something’s off, I put one on. It’s not a conscious decision anymore. It’s just where I go when I need to be somewhere. A familiar emotional atmosphere that doesn’t ask anything of me. A place that already knows how to hold me.

I’m aware this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to grow out of. I haven’t.

So walking through the studio, surrounded by families and teenagers and the occasional full-grown adult in a Hufflepuff scarf (I was not wearing one), I expected to feel impressed. I was. What surprised me was everything underneath the impressed.

These are just objects. Wood. Fabric. Paint. And yet standing there, they didn’t feel like objects. They felt weighted. Charged. Not because of what they are, but because of what I had made them mean.

The thing about encountering the physical version of something that has lived in your internal world for years is that you’re not just looking at it. You’re watching yourself react to it. And in the reaction, you learn what the thing has actually been doing for you.

For me, it turned out it had been doing quite a lot.

Then another thought arrived, one I wasn’t prepared for.

This entire world — this shared language between millions of people — started as one person sitting alone, imagining. J. K. Rowling didn’t just write a story. She lived in a world that didn’t yet exist, long enough that eventually the rest of us joined her.

A mentor of mine once said that a vision is a reality lived ahead of its completion. Standing in the Great Hall, that didn’t feel like a metaphor. It felt literal. Because what is this place, really? A warehouse in Watford where thousands of people walk around collectively agreeing that something fictional matters. Where we recognize symbols, feel emotions, share references — all tied to something that technically isn’t real.

And yet it shapes how we feel. It shapes where we go when we need comfort. It shapes memory.

If something imagined can carry this much weight — if something written can become something inhabited — then what exactly qualifies as real?

I left with a kind of gratitude I didn’t expect, and a realization that stayed longer than the visit.

I hadn’t just been returning to that world all these years. I’d been carrying it. Using it, in quiet ways, to hold parts of myself I didn’t always know how to hold.

“Do you want to join me in London?” he asked. “I’m going to a rally there.”

I said yes almost instinctively.

Not because I supported the movement. Not because I opposed it either. But because I’ve increasingly come to believe that one of the great failures of modern life is that we form opinions about people we’ve never actually sat beside. We inherit conclusions before experience. We watch edited clips, consume algorithmic outrage, and mistake observation for understanding.

Even when I disagree with something, I still find it educational to immerse myself in it. To see it. To feel it. To understand the emotional architecture underneath it.

So I boarded the train from Amsterdam to London and unknowingly stepped into what would later become international news.

The event was called “Unite the Kingdom,” led by someone I had never heard of before. Tommy Robinson. At least that’s the name everyone else seemed to know him by. Before the march began, I met him at a café tucked upstairs above the street. I remember thinking how strangely ordinary it all felt.

He was smaller than I expected. Jeans. Black shirt. Louis Vuitton belt buckle. Not imposing. Not theatrical. Wide-eyed, even slightly overwhelmed by the constant pull of attention around him. Men wanting photos. Others waiting for approval or acknowledgment. There was an energy around him that felt less like authoritarian power and more like someone accidentally becoming the symbol of something much larger than himself.

And then the security arrived.

Only later did I learn that ISIS had reportedly placed a death threat on him over his anti-Islam activism and his positions regarding immigration, particularly in places like Luton. Suddenly the upstairs café no longer felt quaint. It felt a bit intense.

I sat quietly watching people stream in.

MAGA hats. Union Jacks. Heavy tattoos. Construction-worker hands. Strong working-class energy. The kind of people modern intellectual culture often dismisses before they’ve even opened their mouths.

And what struck me most was not aggression.

It was belonging.

Inside that room, everyone made sense to each other.

That’s something we rarely admit about political movements we dislike: from the inside, they almost always feel emotionally coherent. People aren’t usually gathering because they think they’re evil. They gather because they feel unheard. Threatened. Dismissed. Replaced. Humiliated. Invisible.

The march itself was oddly peaceful. Christian imagery appeared everywhere. Jesus. Crosses. Chants about faith, country, and culture. There was a repeated feeling among many participants that they were watching their national identity dissolve while being told they were immoral for noticing.

One man explained to me, with visible frustration, that he believed British institutions had become so afraid of appearing intolerant that they had lost the ability to uphold standards consistently. He recounted stories — exaggerated or not, I couldn’t verify — about immigrants receiving leniency from judges because of “cultural differences.”

What fascinated me wasn’t whether every claim was true.

It was that people believed it was true.

That distinction matters more than we often admit.

Because societies rarely fracture purely from facts. They fracture from perception. From accumulated emotional narratives. From the growing feeling among groups of people that the rules are no longer applied evenly.

As we walked, I kept searching for the hatred the media had prepared me to see.

Of course there were extreme personalities. Every movement has them. But overwhelmingly, what I saw was not racial animosity in the simplistic form it’s often portrayed. What I saw was fear of cultural erosion. Fear that Christianity, British identity, and social cohesion were being diluted faster than society could metabolize.

And those are not the same thing.

Now, whether those fears are justified, exaggerated, manipulated, or weaponized is another conversation entirely. But flattening all of it into “racism” felt intellectually lazy after actually being there.

Then I turned on the television later that evening.

And it was astonishing.

The event I watched on the news barely resembled the event I attended.

The framing was sharper. More polarized. It did not focus on the message of the march. It focused on “30 people were arrested.” It made me realize how much modern media no longer documents nuance as much as it curates emotional conclusions.

And perhaps that’s unavoidable. Cameras can’t capture atmosphere. They can’t capture nuance. They can’t capture the quiet man holding a flag while talking softly about his children. They can’t capture contradictions.

But that leaves us with a problem.

Because once people feel misrepresented long enough, they stop trusting institutions altogether.

And when institutions lose trust, societies begin looking elsewhere for certainty.

That’s the dangerous part.

Not the rally itself.

The erosion underneath it.

I found myself wrestling with something deeper as I walked through the streets that day: the paradox of tolerance.

I consider myself deeply tolerant. I’ve lived across cultures. Married across cultures. Built friendships across religions, ethnicities, political identities, and social classes. I’m instinctively drawn toward complexity rather than tribalism.

But tolerance itself contains a dilemma modern societies rarely know how to address honestly.

What do you do when a group’s values are fundamentally intolerant?

At what point does tolerance become surrender?

If a culture or ideology rejects the very freedoms that allowed it into the room, does protecting it become a form of self-erasure?

These are uncomfortable questions because once spoken aloud, people fear where the conversation leads. So instead, many societies avoid the discussion entirely until frustration mutates underground into resentment.

And resentment, left unattended long enough, eventually stops asking politely.

I don’t pretend to have answers.

I don’t even know if I left London agreeing with the movement.

But I left understanding something important:

Most people do not experience themselves as villains.

And if we continue reducing entire populations to caricatures rather than trying to understand the emotional forces driving them, we will continue accelerating the very polarization we claim to oppose.

Sometimes the most dangerous thing a society can lose is not agreement.

It’s the ability to remain curious about why the other side feels the way they do.

A passport.

I pull it out and it’s red. Dutch. Not blue. American. Carrying two passports is its own small identity crisis, conveniently laminated so you can check on it at borders.

Every time I use the red one, I feel the same small friction — the quiet confrontation with identity not as a concept but as a physical object. Laminated. Approved. Stamped. Reduced.

I’m American by birth. I left when I was twenty. I’ve now spent more years outside the country than inside it, which is the kind of sentence that sounds tidier than it is. The formative years stay in your bones even when your memory loses the texture of them. I couldn’t tell you what my high school hallway smelled like. I could tell you exactly how I feel when I hear the national anthem, which is complicated.

Years ago, watching the Olympics, I rooted for America automatically. It wasn’t a decision. It was reflex. Flag equals me. Anthem equals us.

Somewhere along the way, that shifted.

Now I root for the person. The underdog. The one with something at stake. The one whose story moves me. My allegiance loosened from the borders and reattached to whoever happened to be in the frame.

I didn’t notice it happening. I just noticed, one Olympics, that I was cheering for a Kenyan runner against an American one and feeling nothing about it except go. Somewhere between twenty and now, my patriotism quietly filed for divorce and moved out, and I hadn’t even noticed it packing.

I can name what I appreciate about America, even as my relationship to it has become complicated in the way all adult relationships become complicated. I value independence. Free thought. That electric idea of opportunity — the sense that you can start again, invent again, rebuild again. That there is always another door somewhere if you have the audacity to knock.

And in the Netherlands, I value something almost opposite, and just as important. A social contract. Thoughtfulness about the people around you. Calvinist restraint, which frustrates me and comforts me in the same breath, often on the same day, sometimes in the same meeting. It’s a culture that quietly reminds you: you are not the center. Your freedom is not more important than the room you share with others.

Two passports. Two philosophies.

One says become. One says belong.

I don’t fully belong to either anymore, which is either a loss or a kind of freedom, depending on the day and how the customs line is moving.

What I feel, increasingly, is that I’m not trying to be more American or more Dutch. I’m trying to be more myself. Not the self stamped into a document. Not the self assigned by birthplace. Just the self I’m still building, in whichever country happens to be processing me that day.

When I look down at the red passport, I don’t see myself in the emblem. And instead of panicking, I feel something almost like relief.

Maybe the point isn’t to find yourself in a symbol.

Maybe the point is to stop asking a country to do it for you.

I had come to the house to see a client. I had been working with her since before the boy was born — long enough that I had watched, from the periphery, a child appear in the household and gradually take it over. My work, broadly, involves living alongside families. Whatever is going on in the house, I am, to some degree, part of it. I have sat through dinners, arrivals, departures, minor emergencies, and the particular kind of afternoon in which nothing is happening and everyone is, nevertheless, busy.

Usually, the work is adult. There are things to discuss. Decisions, mostly, and the conversations that lead up to decisions, and the conversations that follow them. I had come, that day, expecting one of those.

I walked into the room, and before I had fully entered it, he saw me.

“Andy!” he said, with the kind of excitement that makes you immediately question whether you’ve done something to deserve it.

He ran over, took my hand, and turned to the room.

“This is my best friend.”

There was no hesitation. No checking with me. No announcement that an announcement was coming. Just the announcement.

I smiled the way you smile when a child has said something generous about you and you’d like, very much, not to ruin it.

“Hi,” I said.

He didn’t let go of my hand.

We walked together for a bit, which felt less like walking and more like I had been acquired. He showed me his collection of superhero books and explained, at length, the entire Marvel Universe, including several people I had not previously been introduced to. A book was placed in front of me. I was asked, repeatedly, to read from it.

At some point, I sat down on the sofa.

He stayed close, which made sense. You don’t announce a best friend and then let them drift.

There was a pause, and I thought perhaps the role was largely ceremonial.

“Tell me a story,” he said.

Ah.

So there were responsibilities.

“I’m a little tired,” I said, hoping to negotiate the terms.

He nodded, which I took as a good sign.

“Grandpa starts with animals.”

This was presented as a helpful guideline, not a suggestion.

“Okay,” I said. “There’s a tiger.”

“And an elephant,” he said.

“Right. They’re friends.”

“Why?”

This felt like an aggressive level of scrutiny for a relationship I had just invented.

“Because they like each other.”

“Why?”

“Because… they have things in common.”

“Why?”

I was beginning to understand the structure of the conversation. He was not, as I had hoped, going to accept things.

“They find a cave,” I said, moving us along.

“Why?”

“Because there’s a dragon in it.”

“Why?”

“Because dragons live in caves.”

“Why?”

I paused. I had been treating each why as an obstacle. But it occurred to me, somewhere around the fourth one, that he wasn’t trying to slow the story down. He wanted to understand what was underneath it.

“Because he’s protecting something,” I said, more carefully now.

“Why?”

“Because it’s his. And he’s worried someone’s going to take it.”

He looked at me, satisfied, finally, with an answer.

“Then what?” he said.

And this was a different question than the ones before it.

The whys had been going downward. Then what meant we were going forward.

I thought about it.

“Then someone comes to the cave,” I said. “And the dragon has to decide what to do.”

“What does he do?”

I looked at him. He was waiting. Not for a guess. For the answer.

“He says hi,” I said.

He nodded.

That seemed to be the right one.

But he didn’t move. He didn’t go off to find something else, the way I had assumed he would once the story had reached a place that could pass for an ending. He stayed exactly where he was, looking at me the way a starving person looks at the last thing on the table.

There was, apparently, more.

I am, by trade and by temperament, someone who recounts. I tell stories about things that happened. I describe rooms I have been in, conversations I have had, people I have met. The stories are, in their way, accurate. They are also, I am realizing now, a kind of safety. If the thing already happened, I cannot get it wrong.

I had not known, until a few minutes earlier, that I could make something up. Or rather — I had known, in theory, the way one knows that one could, in theory, learn an instrument. I had not known what it felt like. There had been a tiger, and an elephant, and a dragon worried about losing something that was his, and none of them had existed before he asked me to find them.

That was one thing.

The other thing was him. Still watching me. Still waiting.

I had been listening to him the whole time, but I had not, until that moment, noticed how he was listening to me. Not the way I listen, which involves a great deal of preparation for what might be said next. He had been entirely inside each sentence as it arrived. When the dragon was scary, the dragon was scary. When the dragon was worried, he adjusted, without resistance, to a worried dragon. He was not, as I tend to be, three sentences ahead, getting ready.

I had written, often, about how we lose the present — how it becomes a thing we pass through rather than a thing we are in. But I had written it from the outside, the way you describe a country you have read about.

He was the country.

And for a few minutes, sitting next to him, inventing a dragon, I had been there too.

“And then what?” he said.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Not delayed. Not rescheduled. Broken. As in: the ocean would continue, but the boat would not.

We were here because a few weeks earlier I had shared photos from a solo trip — sunsets, a sandbar floating in the middle of the ocean, the local celebrity Komodo dragon — and Rani had said, “I want to go there.” So we booked four days, which seemed, at the time, like the responsible amount.

Now we were walking down the main drag, one of those tourist streets where every other person is trying to sell you something and you do your best not to make eye contact. Eventually we ended up in the office of a man who, notably, was not trying to sell us anything. He didn’t stand up. He didn’t wave us in. He just sat there, uninterested, which in that environment was the most persuasive sales tactic available. We went in. We explained our dilemma. He nodded, unbothered, and told us that everyone in the village owned a boat — he just needed to find us a person. He arranged a speedboat to do in a day what we would have otherwise done in two. And so we saw manta rays, Komodo dragons, a sandbar in the middle of nowhere, and enough turquoise water to make you suspicious that someone had adjusted the color settings on reality.

By the end of the day we felt accomplished, which meant we now had a second day with no plan, which is, as I’ve repeated often, the most dangerous situation I can be in.

The next morning we went back to the same man and asked him what we could do today.

He didn’t look up.

“Sunset tour,” he said. “Two o’clock. Twenty-five dollars. Snorkeling. Bats.”

He said “bats” with the confidence of someone who knew bats were the deciding factor.

We agreed immediately. Of course we did.

In hindsight, a man too bored to pitch you a boat tour is not necessarily a man whose boat tour you should take.

At two o’clock we arrived at the dock, where we were greeted by a girl who looked about sixteen. This did not bother me. Everyone has to start somewhere.

Then a another girl appeared, who looked seventeen.

Then a third crew member appeared — a boy, eighteen.

This is when I realized that the combined age of the crew was still less than mine.

It was also at this point that I noticed none of them spoke English well. Or at all.

Normally this would not be a problem, because Rani speaks Indonesian. Except when she spoke Indonesian, they looked confused, which is how I learned that Indonesia has over seven hundred languages, and that we had apparently found the one they spoke that Rani did not.

So now we were on a small wooden boat, in open ocean, being guided by three teenagers who could not speak English, could not understand Indonesian, and who were in charge of our survival.

The eighteen-year-old, who was clearly the captain by virtue of being old enough to vote, began giving instructions in very serious English.

“You sit.”

We sat.

“You wait.”

We waited.

“You life jacket.”

We life-jacketed.

At the first snorkeling stop, he turned to Rani and said, very formally,

“Have a good life.”

Rani, wanting to help, smiled politely and said, “Have a good time.”

He nodded, did not understand a word, and proceeded as if this was exactly the conversation he had intended to have.

We jumped into the water, which was beautiful, clear, and just dangerous enough to make you aware that you had signed no paperwork.

This is when the situation became slightly less theoretical.

The sixteen-year-old decided to get in with us. This would have been reassuring, except that the moment she hit the water, she began to panic.

She was wearing a life vest, but in the way that suggested she did not fully trust the concept.

She started flailing.

The eighteen-year-old watched.

The seventeen-year-old watched.

A man on the boat who looked exactly like the Indonesian version of Rami Malek lit a cigarette and also watched.

This is when I understood that the only person currently responsible for saving the drowning crew member was me, the tourist, who had paid twenty-five dollars for the privilege.

So I jumped in, grabbed her life vest, and pushed her back toward the boat while she held on to me with the strength of someone who had just discovered that the ocean is large.

We got her on board. Everyone nodded as if this was part of the scheduled program.

I later learned she was an intern, sent from a village several hours away on a work-study program. It was, I suppose, a learning experience. Certainly it was for me.

Snorkeling. Sunset. Near-death experience. Bats.

And the strange thing is, none of it felt wrong.

Because this is what vacation actually is. Vacation is saying yes before you understand what you’re saying yes to. It’s booking the trip, finding out the boat is broken, getting on another boat, discovering the crew cannot swim, jumping into the ocean to save them, and still thinking, this will make a good story.

Which may be the real reason we travel.

Not to relax. Not to see the world. But to put ourselves in situations we would never accept at home, and then laugh about them later as if we meant to do it.

The bats, by the way, were spectacular.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Whenever I see him, I shout, “Biewiew!”

He lights up. I light up. We both laugh like we’ve just pulled off something extraordinary, though neither of us has done anything except say his name and acknowledge that it is, objectively, the best name in Southeast Asia.

By now, everyone in the complex knows that I know Biewiew. It’s our thing. The tall foreigner and the tiny human with the superior name. I suspect his parents have mixed feelings about this arrangement, but they’re too polite to say so, which is one of the many small mercies of living in Indonesia.

The complex itself is in South Jakarta, manicured in the way that makes you feel like you’re at a resort — palms, water features, the purposeful hum of a generator somewhere doing generator things. Step outside the gate and you’re immediately swallowed by traffic and diesel fumes, which is why walking inside the grounds is one of the only real options. The pollution still finds you, obviously. Pollution is resourceful. But inside, you have the illusion of a tropical paradise, and the illusion is really the whole product. The only thing obstructing the fantasy is the five-meter wall crowned with barbed wire, always within eyeline no matter where you loop. A paradise that needs that much fortification is telling on itself a little, but you learn not to look directly at it. Like the sun. Or the ingredient list on anything you actually enjoy eating.

The other day I was doing my usual laps when I spotted Biewiew behind an old man in a wheelchair. The man looked ancient. Sunglasses. Slumped posture. The kind of stillness that makes you wonder how much of him is still here and how much has drifted somewhere else.

Behind him stood a caretaker on her phone, as she always is — scrolling, thumb-flicking, elsewhere. She’s the one who moves him. I’ve worked out, over weeks of observation, that she parks him in one spot, vanishes into her screen, and then sometime later he materializes somewhere new. On a single walk I’ll pass him in four or five different locations, as though he’s being rotated through the complex by invisible hands. I’ve never once seen her look at him. I track her before I track him, which I suspect is how most people move through the world — noticing the able-bodied first and the still ones second.

I waved enthusiastically at Biewiew.

The old man waved back.

And just like that, I had accidentally made a friend.

There was a split second where I could have course-corrected. A glance at the child, a shift in body language, a break in eye contact. Instead, I smiled and waved again.

He waved again.

Now, every time I pass him, he waves at me.

And I walk a lot.

Ten loops around the complex means ten waves. By the second lap, I could already see it — his eyes were looking for me now, tracking forward instead of drifting past the way they had before. By the seventh, we’re basically in a committed relationship. By the tenth, I’m wondering if I should learn his name, and then remembering that the whole appeal is that I don’t know it.

It’s absurd. All because of a mistake.

And yet there’s something quietly beautiful about it, and I’m aware that’s the kind of line that belongs on a tote bag. Bear with me anyway. This man, who probably goes hours without anyone quite knowing what to do with him, now has someone who sees him. Even if it started by accident. Even if the someone is a confused foreigner who was trying to wave at a toddler.

No conversation. No shared language. Just a small gesture that says, I recognize you.

I have no idea what it means to him. He might think I’m slightly unhinged. He might think I’m a long-lost nephew. He might simply enjoy the break in monotony between whatever view the caretaker has most recently assigned him. I’ll never know, and that’s part of it. We don’t share a language. We’re not going to. The wave is the entire conversation, and somehow the wave is enough.

It reminds me how thin the line is between anonymity and connection. How one misplaced wave can become a ritual. How life hands us these small, ridiculous openings — and if we don’t overthink them, they turn into something tender.

We like to imagine meaning comes from intention. From grand gestures. From carefully crafted moments. From the kind of life events that look good on a Christmas card.

But sometimes meaning arrives sideways.

Sometimes it looks like an old man in sunglasses, waving back at you for the tenth time that day, behind a caretaker who hasn’t looked up from her phone in an hour, inside a resort with barbed wire, on the tenth loop of a walk you’re only taking because the air outside the gate is trying to kill you.

And somehow, improbably, that is the part of the day that feels real.

The only thing required is to wave back.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​