Brazil Finds Ways to Stay Light in a Bleak World

The author recalls a childhood memory of dusk when sodium streetlights turned the world a yellow monochrome, a moment that always made them sad. One evening, their father noticed their quietness and asked why. The author could not explain how their father did not feel the same way. The evening had started, the ditch outside was freezing, and people’s breath formed clouds in the air.

“Let’s get an ice cream in the village,” the father said. The author sat on the back of his 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 streetlight, the father holding his bike in the snow, eating ice cream with sprinkles. “Lekker he?” he said, meaning “Delicious, huh?” The author felt the father was saying, “We are both feeling this together, aren’t we?”

Staying Light-Hearted

Now thirty years old, the author lost their father to cancer ten years ago. Growing up felt like those evenings when the sodium lights lit up the streets: as time passed, the world lost some of its color. Broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that never became reality, unspoken words too late to say. These are things to look back on, to be bitter about, or to get stuck on. Time leaves its marks, and nobody escapes it.

The author watched people cope in various ways: clinging to careers, projecting onto partners, turning to gurus, or simply turning 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 while growing older. In their twenties, they lost themselves in philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, traveling, filmmaking, and writing. They loved being busy, being neurotic, staying up late, trying to learn new things and new perspectives, anything to fight off embitterment. It felt as if the pursuit of meaningful answers justified the meaninglessness of most suffering.

One mentor in art school 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 made sense years later. Throughout their twenties, the author fared well from the outside. But the question remained: how can we stay light in the heart while carrying the weight of the lingering past? The more the author found, the bleaker the world seemed. The sodium-lamp feeling stopped being something that happened only in the evenings and became always present. The colors did not come back in the mornings anymore.

There came a period where the author had exhausted their known world. Every answer produced a bleaker world than the one before it. Somewhere in that monochrome stretch, a thought kept returning, not as a plan but as an assurance: the door was there if they wanted it. That they could step out. During that time, the author spoke to a woman who was light, full of color, and always seemed to smile. She had a tea box with flavors like Namastea, empatea, and tearapy. She forgot the actual flavors, and they laughed together.

They spoke of many things, and each time she reacted with a smile, a joke, or a weird face, never dismissing the weight of their conversations but always choosing the light. The steam of the teacup rose gently. Outside, snow was dripping water. A young tree had started to blossom. “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 said. “You don’t care, do you?” The author realized that in their search for answers, they had ceased the search 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, and within that abyss, they found they had nothing left to lose. If they had nothing left to lose, then they could go anywhere and do anything. The unknown that had become an enemy was suddenly the only place left that still breathed with life. The author went looking for it.

The author and their love walked backwards for two months across northern Spain, literally backwards, on the Camino de Santiago, 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, and they found themselves feeling lighter, freer, and more present.

Then they left Amsterdam entirely and moved to the campo of Panama, because they wanted to know what happens in real solitude, far away from anything distracting and familiar. In that solitude, the author found themselves face-to-face with everything they 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 their father through the stories of others, the author learned he had been struggling with existence just as much as they had. They just never saw it. After all, he was Dad: the person who knew everything and could fix anything. But on that particular night, the author thinks the father knew what they were 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 rather the refusal to let the monochrome ‘win.’ The 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 their love in Panama, overlooking the heights of Volcán Barú as day turned into night, the author caught themselves saying, “Lekker hé?” They realized that in that moment, they were living in the same place their father had been all along. Not above the world, not against it, but inside it, enjoying something nice, next to someone they love.