“Love life more than its meaning? Yes, of course.” ~Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
When I was a kid, there was a special moment at dusk when the old sodium lamps lit up the streets, turning the world from saturation to a yellow monochrome, and it always made me sad.
One such day, my father asked me why I had become so quiet during those evenings. I didn’t know what to say – why didn’t he feel the same way?
The evening had just begun, outside the trench was freezing. Looking out the window, I saw clouds of people’s breath in the air.
“Let’s get an ice cream in the village,” he said.
I got on the back of the bike and the yellow world swept past. People lost their color in the streets. The store was about to close, but we were just in time.
A few moments later we were standing in front of the shop, right under one of the lanterns. My dad kept his bike in the snow and enjoyed his ice cream sundae.
“Is he Lekker?” he said. (“Delicious, huh?”)
I was never sure, but I felt at that moment he wanted to say, “We both feel this together, don’t we?”
About staying light
I am now thirty years old and it has been ten years since I lost my father to cancer. In retrospect, growing up felt like the evenings when sodium lamps lit the streets: the world inevitably lost its color over time.
Broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that never come true, unspoken words, too late to say. More things to look back on, get bitter about, or get stuck somewhere along the way. Time leaves its mark one way or another, and no one seems to escape it.
How do we deal with this fact of life? And how does one cling to color, resist bitterness, and remain lighthearted like a child? Is it even possible?
Growing up, I’ve seen people deal with this in a variety of ways: sticking to a career, projecting it onto partners, turning to gurus, or simply going gray. Others are intoxicated by the idea that with enough effort they can make a difference in this world.
I subscribed to the latter and committed myself to a mission to stay light as I age.
In my twenties, I lost myself in philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, travel, filmmaking, and writing. I loved being busy, being neurotic, staying up late, learning new things, learning new ideas, new perspectives—anything to combat the bitterness. It felt as if the search for meaningful answers justified the meaninglessness of most of life’s suffering.
One of my former mentors in art school said to me one day, “Sam, being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do.” I didn’t fully understand him at the time, but like most things he said, it didn’t make sense until years later.
From the outside, I was doing pretty well throughout my twenties. But even in those moments when life was truly good, the question remained unanswered: how can we remain light in our hearts while carrying the weight of the lingering past?
The more I found, the bleaker the world seemed. I got to the point where the sodium lamp feeling stopped being something that only happened in the evenings and became something that was always there. The colors did not come back in the morning.
There came a time when I had completely exhausted my known world – or at least it felt like it. Each answer I found created a bleaker world than the last. And somewhere in that monochrome stretch, a thought kept coming back—not exactly as a plan, but as a kind of assurance: that the door is there if I want it. That I could get out.
During this time I spoke with a light, colorful and smiling woman. He had a tea box that didn’t have red bush, mint or Earl Grey. Instead, Namastea, empathea, tearapy, etc. volt. He actually forgot the real flavors and we laughed and laughed and laughed.
We talked about a lot of things, and every time he reacted with a smile, a joke, a strange face, he never dismissed the weight of our conversations, but always chose the light.
The steam from my teacup rose gently. Snow was dripping from the water outside. A young tree began to bloom.
“Aren’t you just someone who comes and goes and explores as honestly as you can? If so, why don’t you continue to explore? Sure, it won’t be a comfortable lifestyle, but who cares?” he said.
“I don’t care, do I?”
That’s when I realized that while I was looking for answers, I stopped looking for questions.
The Unknown
The unknown is a child’s friend – until the child grows up and becomes their enemy, causing heartache and hopelessness.
This hopelessness led me to the abyss, and within that abyss I found that I had nothing to lose. And if I had nothing left to lose, I could go anywhere and do anything.
The unknown that had become my enemy was suddenly the only place that still breathed life.
So I went looking for it.
My love and I spent two months walking backwards in Northern Spain, literally backwards, on the Camino de Santiago, because we wanted to know what the “embrace of the unknown” was really like. At first, we were constantly preparing for disaster because we couldn’t see where we were going.
But with sufficient deceleration, nothing terrible happened. Instead, the unknown gradually stopped feeling like something to be wary of, and we found ourselves feeling lighter, freer, and more present.
Then we left Amsterdam completely and moved to the Panama camp because we wanted to know what was happening in real solitude, away from all distractions and familiarity.
In this solitude, I found myself face to face with everything I had left behind: the refusal to accept things as they were, the need to “be something” in a world that felt bleak, and the frantic desire to understand it all.
Finding the ice cream
Getting to know my father through other people’s stories, it turned out that he, too, struggled for existence just like me. I just never saw it. After all, he was the father: the man who knew everything and could fix anything.
But on that particular night, I think he knew what I was going through. And he didn’t try to fix it, explain it, or forget it.
Instead, he got on his bike and took us to the ice cream shop.
I’m thinking about this a lot right now – not about the ice cream itself, but more about not letting monochrome “win”.
He didn’t fight sodium lanterns and pretend the world hadn’t turned colorless. He just decided that wasn’t a good enough reason to skip the vanilla sprinkles.
The other night, sitting in the sunshine with my love in Panama, overlooking the heights of Volcán Barú and the day slowly turning to night, I found myself saying:
“Nice, huh?”
I realized that at that moment I was living in the same place where my father had been all along. Not above the world, not against it, but in it, enjoying something beautiful, next to someone I love.
About Samuel van Keeken
Dutch writer, artist and filmmaker Samuel van Keeken lives in Panama, where he was a co-founder It’s the same worldwide: home to essays, artwork, and retreats. At its center is the Same Method, a framework for cultivating existential courage and meaningful action in everyday life.
