Brazil seeks light in a world that feels increasingly bleak

As a child, there was a moment during dusk when the old sodium streetlights turned on, turning the world into a yellow monochrome, and it always made him sad.

One evening, his father asked why he became so quiet. The boy did not know how to answer. He wondered how his father did not feel the same way. The evening had just started, and the ditch outside was freezing. Through the window, he could see the clouds of people’s breath in the cold air.

“Let’s get an ice cream in the village,” his father said.

The boy sat on the back of his father’s bicycle. 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 one of the lanterns. His father held his bike in the snow, eating his ice cream with sprinkles.

“Lekker he?” his father said, meaning “Delicious, huh?”

The boy never knew for sure, but it felt as if his father was saying, “We are both feeling this together, aren’t we?”

The writer is now thirty years old. It has been ten years since he lost his father to cancer. Looking back, growing up felt like those evenings when the sodium lights lit up the streets. As time passed, the world lost some of its color.

There were broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that never became reality, and words left unspoken until it was too late. Time leaves its marks, and no one escapes it. The question is how to cope. How can a person hold onto color, resist growing bitter, and stay light-hearted like a child?

Growing up, the writer watched people cope in different ways. Some clung to careers. Others projected their feelings onto partners, turned to gurus, or simply grew grey themselves. Some got drunk on the idea that with enough effort, they could change the world.

The writer chose the last option. He pledged to stay lighthearted as he got older. In his twenties, he lost himself in philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, traveling, filmmaking, and writing. He loved being busy, staying up late, and learning new things. It felt as if the search for meaningful answers justified the meaninglessness of life’s suffering.

One of his mentors in art school told him, “Sam, being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do.” He did not fully understand her at the time. The words only made sense years later.

From the outside, he fared well in his twenties. But even in good moments, the question remained: how can a person stay light in the heart while carrying the weight of the 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 when he felt he had exhausted his known world. Every answer he found produced a bleaker world than the one before it. In that monochrome stretch, a thought kept returning. It was not a plan, but a kind of assurance. The door was there if he wanted it. He could step out.

During that time, he spoke to a woman who was light and full of color. She always seemed to smile. She had a tea box that did not have regular flavors. Instead, she had names like 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 she always chose the light. The steam from his teacup rose gently. Outside, the 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?” she asked. “If so, why not continue exploring? Sure, it won’t be a convenient lifestyle, but who cares?”

He realized then that in his search for answers, he had stopped searching for questions.

The unknown is a child’s friend until the child grows up. Then it becomes an enemy, bringing heartache and hopelessness. That hopelessness led him into the abyss. Within that abyss, he found he had nothing left to lose. If he had nothing left to lose, 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.

He went looking for it. He and his love walked backwards for two months across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago. They did it 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 felt lighter, freer, and more present.

Then they left Amsterdam entirely. They 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, he faced everything he had been outrunning. That included 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.

Getting to know his father through the stories of others, he learned that his father had struggled with existence just as much as he had. He just never saw it. His father was Dad, the person who knew everything and could fix anything. But on that particular night, he thinks his father knew what he was going through. He did not try to fix it, explain it, or rationalize it. Instead, he got on his bike and rode them to the ice cream shop.

The writer 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 day turned into night, he caught himself saying, “Lekker hé?”

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.