borrowed from the wind
a kindness I wore gently—
it stayed, and I grew
It began in a damp train station in Porto. I was 21 and lost—lost in the good way, the kind where you know there’s no map, and that’s the point. I had just missed my connection, and the rain was coming sideways. The vending machine ate my coin. The air smelled of seaweed and exhaust. And still—someone offered me half their sandwich. An old woman with thin, paper-like skin and a face shaped like time itself. She didn’t speak English. I didn’t speak Portuguese. But I understood the gesture.
That’s where it started. Not my journey—those are dime a dozen. No, that was the first time I understood that the best parts of myself were borrowed.
In Naples, it was a baker named Carlo who taught me the value of rhythm. Not spoken rhythm, not music—but the cadence of routine. I lived above his bakery for three weeks. At 4:42 every morning, I’d wake to the sound of dough being slapped against wood. One morning, I asked him how he did it without getting tired.
He looked at me and said, “Because I’m not trying to be anything. Just bread today.”
That stayed with me longer than any philosophy book I’ve read.
In Jeonju, South Korea, I was twenty-six and in love with someone who wasn’t in love with me. She’d gone back to Seoul. I stayed in a hanok guesthouse run by a former monk who brewed his own tea. He didn’t talk much, but when he did, he looked you directly in the eyes, like he wanted to see what you weren’t saying.
Over hojicha, he said, “Attachment is not love. Love is letting the other go and still staying soft.”
I didn’t write it down. But I never forgot it.
In rural Slovenia, where my grandparents still live, I watched my grandfather dig out weeds from under a cherry tree. It was July. The sky was bruised with heat. I was impatient.
“Why don’t you just cut them all at once?” I asked.
He smiled, not looking up. “Because not all roots are visible. You’ll just be cutting the leaves.”
He wasn’t talking about gardening, but I only realized that years later, in a Zurich park after a long walk alone.
In Oaxaca, I shared a ride with a woman who had lost her child and now volunteered at a birth center. We didn’t talk for the first hour. Then she asked me if I believed pain made people better.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Me neither,” she replied. “But it makes us real.”
She gave me a bracelet she’d woven from palm leaves. It broke a few weeks later. But I still have the bead.
In Bern, Switzerland, I met a retired architect who built nothing after sixty. He just walked. One day, we sat together near the Aare river, watching the ducks.
He said, “I spent my life trying to leave something behind. But the most lasting thing I ever did was listen when my wife spoke.”
I never met his wife. But I felt like I had.
In the Berner Oberland, I biked for six hours on a heatwave afternoon with someone I barely knew. We didn’t talk much. Just sweat, sun, and mountains. That kind of silence becomes its own language.
At the end, we collapsed in a field of wild thyme and dandelions. He said, “You know, the only way I know who I am… is by noticing how I change around others.”
That sentence still echoes.
Wabi-Sabi Lessons from the Road
- What we call “ourselves” is often made from others. The kindnesses. The pauses. The small beliefs they passed on in silence.
- Nothing has to be perfect to shape you. Most of the people I carry in me were imperfect—some deeply flawed—but their fragments made me more whole.
- Travel doesn’t just show you the world. It shows you the mirrors in other people. And if you’re lucky, you see enough reflections to piece yourself together differently.
- When you walk through life open—even a little—you collect seeds. Some sprout decades later, quietly, in places you never planned to visit again.
A Final Thought
What I love most about myself are the invisible fingerprints of everyone who’s left something with me. Their rhythm, their words, their silence. Even the heartbreaks, the strangers, the ones I disappointed and the ones who forgave me.
They’re in me. All of them.
And maybe that’s the most human thing about any of us:
We are not our own creations.
We are mosaics of fleeting kindness.
A thousand quiet borrowings held together by time.
A self made of selves.
life 
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