The Belgians Cleaned Their Own Rooms

On the fifth kite surfing session I got up on the board and rode it. Not far and not for long, but I was up and moving and doing the thing I'd flown to Sri Lanka to do.

I have no idea whether it was me.

It didn't feel like something I did on purpose. It felt like the kite and the board and the wind happened to agree with each other for a few seconds while I was standing in the middle of them. Beginner's luck, probably. I figured another session or two would tell me which one it was.

I didn't get another session or two.

Next time out I skipped my booties, on the theory that I'd get a better feel for the board without them. I did get a better feel for the board. I also opened up my foot, which meant no kiting that day, no kiting the day after, and a flight home on the 8th from a trip I'd booked until the 14th. Seven days out of fourteen, four of them on the water, two of them blown out with no wind at all.

So I spent the end of my week in Kappalady sitting on the sand with a bandaged foot, watching everybody else kite.

The people on that beach

Pierre is Italian and past fifty, though you wouldn't guess it from looking at him. He runs a travel business, or a consultancy, I never quite got it straight. Probably doesn't matter either. This is what really made me do a double take: one month a year Pierre goes kite surfing somewhere in the world. One month a year he goes snowboarding somewhere in the world. Everything else arranges itself around those two months. And while I was there, him and Fig were working out how to get to Rio for Carnival.

There was an Austrian couple, six or seven months into a one-year sabbatical, going around the world. Their thing is that wherever they land, they find a fitness event and sign up for it. Two Hyrox races so far, a few half marathons. It started as a way to stay in shape and turned into the catalyst for them to meet anybody, because a start line is full of locals and a hotel lobby isn't. In Sri Lanka they rented a tuktuk. Not a car with a driver to get them from the airport to the nice bit and back. A tuktuk, which they drove themselves, around the whole country.

Alex is Dutch and teaches kite surfing. Lindsey is American and teaches sex education. They live in Mexico for the kiting season and when it ends they travel and teach somewhere else. They were in Sri Lanka to kite the coastline from Kappalady all the way up to Jaffna, which is kind of wild. They ate at the same places we ate at, off the same menus, and nothing about them suggested they were rich. But their lives seemed rich.

And then our hosts, a Belgian couple who bought a piece of land in 2020 and built the guesthouse we were staying in. They kite. That's why they picked the spot. Six years in, they're the ones cooking breakfast and they're the ones cleaning the rooms, because they still can't justify paying anybody local to help. They aren't running a boutique hotel with staff and a concept. They are two people who wanted a particular life, bought some land, built a house on it, and are now doing the laundry. Six years of that, and they were the happiest people I met all week.

Everyone I know is climbing something

I've been telling people about these four households since I got back and mangling the point every time. And perhaps trying to figure out what the point really was.

It isn't that these people had a boatload of money. I don't think they were "rich" in the traditional sense of the word. I have no idea what any of them are worth. Pierre's business sounds like it does fine. Buying land in Sri Lanka takes capital. That's not the thing.

The thing is that everyone I know is climbing something. And you can aim for different things and there is no right or wrong ladder to climb.

People in jobs working their way up the ladder. Founders trying to get to the exit. People running the family business their parents ran. Different ladders, same shape, and the shape assumes a sequence: you climb first, and later on there's a life. And when the later part arrives it's two weeks off, and you spend it as a tourist. You go to the good restaurant the concierge recommends and you take the photo at the viewpoint and you come home and you go back to climbing.

Nobody I grew up around organises a year around two months of wind. Nobody signs up for a Hyrox in a country they've never been to so they'll have somebody to talk to afterwards. It's not that I thought those lives were bad. It's that I'd never watched one up close, for a week, with the person living it eating dinner two tables over. Different ladders, different climbs. But it seemed like the same end goal we're all aspiring to: happiness and a sense of freedom to do what you want.

I'm the most conventional person in this story

And I'm doing the same thing.

I have a full-time job. I'm on a ladder. When I'm on holiday I work most days, and the days I don't work I feel a little strange about it. If you put my life on that beach next to the four I've just described, mine is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb in that beach shack.

Two months before Sri Lanka I spent a couple of weeks alone in Georgia, and I was a textbook tourist. So much so that I had to invent a workaround for it. I started asking every bartender and waiter who'd been good to me for the two places they'd send me if they could only pick two, and then going to those places and dropping the name of the person who'd sent me. It worked. People were warmer, the evenings were better, and I've said since that I'll do it on every trip. Which is a nice trick, and it's also a trick, and I only needed it because the default version of me abroad is a man taking photos of a church.

When we'll start to enjoy life

I heard the sequence out loud growing up.

My parents used to say that once Kshitij and I were on our own two feet, that's when they'd start to enjoy life. Then it was once we were settled. Then it was once we were married. There was always a next marker and the enjoying was always on the far side of it.

They weren't unhappy people and I'm not going to pretend they spent thirty years denying themselves. But things got kept for later, and later kept being defined by events that were never really theirs to schedule.

And I won't go into details about why, but most of what they'd kept for later isn't available to them now.

The other anchor in my life is my wife's, and she always seemed to say a version of it: unconventional does not equal bad. Swati wasn't in Sri Lanka, but a lot of what I've done that's worked has her fingerprints on it, because she's the one who keeps asking why we're doing something the standard way when nobody's checked whether the standard way is any good. I've been married to that argument for fourteen years and it still needed four sets of strangers on a beach in Kappalady for it to sink in deeper. Not sure whether I've fully immersed myself yet though.

Morocco

I'm not worried about the kiting. This already happened to me once.

I couldn't surf for years. I'd go out, I'd fight the board, I'd come in. Then I did a three-week trip to Morocco, where there was nothing to do except surf, and somewhere in the middle of those three weeks it stopped being a fight. Nobody taught me a new thing. I don't have a moment I can point to. It just started happening.

I'm not a good surfer. I've never been a good surfer. I go out, I catch a couple, I come in happy. That's plenty for me. There's a seventy-year-old who was taking kiting lessons from my instructor the same week I was in Sri Lanka. I saw a video the kite school put up later that day, and he's up, and he's going. He's twenty-nine years older than me and he got up before I did.

I'm not selling the flat and moving to Kappalady to run a guesthouse. I like my job. I like the things I'm building. My foot's healed and I'm working out when I can get back on the water, and when I do maybe I'll find out that session five was luck after all.

But fifty-two weeks of climbing a conventional ladder with two weeks off for good behaviour is the only version anybody ever showed me, and I am into my forties and still watching four other versions of that ladder. Seems enticing and magical. But I don't know if I can pull the trigger. Or even pick which ladder I should be climbing.

I've been home ten days and I think about this most days, and that's as far as I've got with it.