When the old sodium streetlights flickered on at dusk, the world outside turned a yellow monochrome. As a child, this moment always made the author sad. One evening, his father noticed his quiet mood and asked why. The author could not explain how his father did not feel the same melancholy.
The evening had started, and the ditch outside was freezing. Through the window, the author could see clouds of people’s breath in the cold air. His father suggested they get ice cream in the village. The author sat on the back of his father’s bicycle as the yellow world drifted by. People on the streets had lost their color. The shop was about to close, but they arrived just in time.
They stood outside under a lantern. His father held his bike in the snow, eating ice cream with sprinkles. “Lekker he?” he said, meaning “Delicious, huh?” The author was never sure, but it felt as if his father meant to say, “We are both feeling this together, aren’t we?”
Staying Light-Hearted
The author is now thirty years old. It has been ten years since his father died of cancer. Looking back, growing up felt like those evenings when the sodium lights lit up the streets. With time passing, the world inevitably lost some of its color. Broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that never came true, words left unspoken and too late to be said. These are things to look back on and become bitter about, or to get stuck on somewhere along the way. Time leaves its marks, and nobody escapes it.
The author watched people cope with this in various ways. Some clung to careers. Others projected their feelings onto partners. Some turned to gurus or simply turned grey themselves. Others got drunk on the idea that with enough effort, they could make a change in the world. The author subscribed to the latter, pledging to stay lighthearted as he grew older.
In his twenties, he lost himself in philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, traveling, filmmaking, and writing. He loved being busy, being neurotic, staying up late, trying to learn new things, new ideas, and new perspectives. It felt as if the pursuit of meaningful answers justified the meaninglessness of most of life’s suffering. An early mentor in art school once said, “Sam, being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do.” The author did not fully understand at the time, but the words would only make sense years later.
Throughout his twenties, from the outside, the author fared well. But even in good moments, the question remained unanswered: how can we stay light in the heart while carrying the weight of the lingering past? The more he found, the bleaker the world seemed. The sodium-lamp-feeling stopped being something that happened only in the evenings. It became something that was always there. The colors did not come back in the mornings anymore.
There came a period where the author exhausted his known world entirely. Every answer he found produced a bleaker world than the one before it. Somewhere in that monochrome stretch, a thought kept returning. Not as a plan, but as a kind of assurance that the door was there if he wanted it. That he could step out.
During that time, he spoke to a woman who was light, full of color, and always seemed to smile. She had a tea box that did not have red bush, mint, or Earl Grey. Instead, she had Namastea, empatea, and tearapy. She forgot the actual flavors, and they laughed together. They spoke of many things. Each time she reacted with a smile, a joke, or a weird face. She never dismissed the weight of their conversations, but always chose the light.
The steam from his teacup flowed upward. Outside, the snow was dripping water. A young tree had started to blossom. She said, “Aren’t you simply a man who comes and goes, exploring as genuinely as he can? If so, why not continue exploring? Sure, it won’t be a convenient lifestyle, but who cares?” She added, “You don’t care, do you?” The author realized then that in his search for answers, he had stopped searching for questions.
The Unknown
The unknown is a child’s friend, until the child grows up and it becomes an enemy, inflicting heartache and hopelessness. That hopelessness led the author into the abyss. Within that abyss, he found he had nothing left to lose. And if he had nothing left to lose, then he could go anywhere and do anything. The unknown that had become his enemy was suddenly the only place left that still breathed with life. So he went looking for it.
The author and his love walked backwards for two months across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago. They did this because they wanted to know what embracing the unknown actually felt like. At first, they were constantly braced for catastrophe because they could not see where they were going. But with enough slowing down, nothing terrible happened. The unknown gradually stopped feeling like a thing to be wary of. They found themselves feeling lighter, freer, and more present.
Then they left Amsterdam entirely and moved to the campo of Panama. They wanted to know what happens in real solitude, far away from anything distracting and familiar. In that solitude, the author found himself face-to-face with everything he had been outrunning: the unwillingness to accept things as they are, the need to be something in a world that felt bleak, and the frantic desire to make sense of it all.
Finding Your Ice Cream
Getting to know his father through the stories of others, the author learned that his father had been struggling with existence just as much as he had. He just never saw it. After all, his father was Dad: the person who knew everything and could fix anything. But on that particular night, the author thinks his father knew what he was going through. He did not try to fix it, explain it, or rationalize it into oblivion. Instead, he got on his bike and rode them to the ice cream shop.
The author thinks about that a lot now. Not about the ice cream itself, but about the refusal to let the monochrome win. His father did not fight the sodium lanterns or pretend the world was not turning colorless. He just decided that was not a good enough reason to skip out on vanilla with sprinkles.
The other evening, sitting in the sun with his love in Panama, overlooking the heights of Volcán Barú as the day turned into night, the author caught himself saying, “Lekker he?” He realized that in that moment, he was living in the same place his father had been all along. Not above the world, not against it, but inside it, enjoying something nice, next to someone he loves.
