Brazil Finds Hope in Staying Light Amid Global Gloom

The author reflects on a childhood memory of dusk, when sodium streetlights turned the world a yellow monochrome, and how that moment always made him sad. His father noticed his quietness and asked about it. Without a clear answer, the father took him on a bicycle ride to get ice cream. Standing under a lantern, eating ice cream with sprinkles in the snow, the father said, “Lekker he?” which means “Delicious, huh?” The author felt his father was acknowledging that they were both feeling the same melancholy together.

Now 30 years old, the author lost his father to cancer a decade ago. He describes growing up as similar to those evenings: the world losing its color over time, with broken hearts, bad decisions, and unfulfilled dreams. He asks how people cope with life’s inevitable marks and stay light-hearted without growing bitter. He observed others clinging to careers, partners, or gurus, or turning grey themselves. He chose to pursue a quest to stay lighthearted, losing himself in philosophy, arts, and travel, believing that seeking meaningful answers justified life’s suffering.

One of his art school mentors told him, “Being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do,” a statement he only understood years later. Despite outward success, the question of staying light while carrying the weight of the past remained unresolved. The more he found, the bleaker the world seemed, until the sodium-lamp-feeling became constant, and colors stopped returning in the mornings. He reached a point of exhaustion, feeling that every answer produced a bleaker world, and a thought of giving up kept returning.

During that time, he spoke to a woman who was light and full of color. She had a tea box with playful names like “Namastea” and “empatea,” and they laughed together. She told him, “Aren’t you simply a man who comes and goes, exploring as genuinely as he can? If so, why not continue exploring?” He realized he had stopped seeking questions and was only looking for answers.

The unknown, once a child’s friend, became an enemy causing heartache. That hopelessness led him into an abyss where he had nothing left to lose. He decided to embrace the unknown. He and his love walked backwards for two months across northern Spain on the Camino de Santiago to experience what “embracing the unknown” felt like. Initially braced for catastrophe, they found that with slowing down, nothing terrible happened. The unknown stopped feeling threatening, and they felt lighter and freer.

They then moved from Amsterdam to the countryside of Panama to experience real solitude. In that solitude, he faced everything he had been avoiding: the unwillingness to accept things as they are, the need to be something in a bleak world, and the frantic desire to make sense of it all.

Learning about his father through others, he discovered his father had also struggled with existence. On that night with the ice cream, his father didn’t try to fix or explain the sadness. Instead, he got on his bike and took them to the ice cream shop. The author now thinks about that as a refusal to let the monochrome win. His father didn’t fight the lanterns or pretend the world wasn’t colorless. He just decided that wasn’t a reason to skip out on vanilla with sprinkles.

Recently, sitting in the sun with his love in Panama, overlooking Volcán Barú as day turned to night, the author caught himself saying, “Lekker hé?” He realized he was living in the same place his father had been all along: not above the world or against it, but inside it, enjoying something nice next to someone he loves.