“Love life more than the meaning of it? Yes, certainly.” ~Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
When I was a child, there was a special moment during dusk when the old sodium lanterns switched on in the streets, morphing the world from one of saturation into one of yellow monochrome, and it always made me sad.
One such day, my dad asked me why I became so quiet during those evenings. I wasn’t sure what to answer—how did he not feel the same way?
The evening had just begun, and the ditch outside had started freezing. Looking through the window, I could see the clouds of people’s breath in the air.
“Let’s get an ice cream in the village,” he said.
I sat on the back of his bicycle, and the yellow world was drifting by. The people on the streets had lost their color. The shop was about to close, but we were just in time.
Moments later, we were standing outside the shop, directly under one of those lanterns. My dad was holding his bike in the snow, enjoying his ice cream with sprinkles.
“Lekker he?” he said. (“Delicious, huh?”)
I’ve never been sure, but it felt as if in that moment, he meant to say, “We are both feeling this together, aren’t we?”
On Staying Light-Hearted
I’m thirty now, and it’s been ten years since I lost my dad to cancer. In hindsight, growing up felt much like those evenings when the sodium lights lit up the streets: with time passing by, the world inevitably lost some of its color.
Broken hearts, bad decisions, dreams that’ll never make it into reality, words unspoken, too late to be said. More things to look back on, to be bitter about, or to get stuck on somewhere along the way. Time leaves its marks one way or another, and nobody seems to escape it.
How do we cope with this fact of life? And how can one hold onto color, resist growing bitter, and stay light-hearted like a child? Is it even possible?
Growing up, I watched people cope with this in various ways: clinging to careers, projecting it onto partners, turning to gurus, or simply turning grey themselves. Others got drunk on the idea that with enough effort, they could make a change in this world.
I subscribed to the latter, pledging myself to a quest to stay lighthearted as I’d grow older.
In my twenties, I would lose myself in philosophy, the arts, powerlifting, trading, traveling, filmmaking, and writing. I loved being busy, being neurotic, staying up late, trying to learn new things, new ideas, new perspectives—anything to fight off embitterment. It felt as if the pursuit of meaningful answers justified the meaninglessness of most of life’s suffering.
One of my earlier mentors in art school one day said to me, “Sam, being a romantic in this world is one of the hardest things you can do.” I didn’t fully understand her at the time, but as with most things she said, they would only make sense years later.
Throughout my twenties, seen from the outside, I fared pretty well. But even in moments when life was genuinely good, the question remained unresolved: how can we stay light in the heart while carrying the weight of the lingering past?
The more I found, the bleaker the world seemed to be. It got me to a point where the sodium-lamp-feeling stopped being something that happened solely in the evenings and had become something that was always there. The colors didn’t come back in the mornings anymore.
There came a period where I’d exhausted my known world entirely—or at least, that’s what it felt like. Every answer I found produced a bleaker world than the one before it. And somewhere in that monochrome stretch, a thought kept returning—not exactly as a plan, but as a kind of assurance: that the door was there if I wanted it. That I could step out.
During that time, I spoke to a woman who was light, full of color, and always seemed to smile. She had a tea box that didn’t have red bush, mint, or Earl Grey. Instead, she’d have Namastea, empatea, tearapy, etc. Actually, she forgot the actual flavors, and we laughed and laughed and laughed.
We spoke of many things, and each time she reacted with a smile, a joke, a weird face, never dismissing the weight of our conversations, but always choosing the light.
The steam of my teacup was gently flowing upward. 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? If so, why not continue exploring? Sure, it won’t be a convenient lifestyle, but who cares?” she said.
“You don’t care, do you?”
I realized then that in my search for answers, I had ceased the search for questions.
The Unknown
The unknown is a child’s friend—until the child grows up and it becomes its enemy, inflicting heartache and hopelessness.
That hopelessness led me into the abyss, and within that abyss, I found I had nothing left to lose. And if I had nothing left to lose, then I could go anywhere and do anything.
The unknown that had become my enemy was suddenly the only place left that still breathed with life.
So I went looking for it.
My love and I walked backwards for two months across northern Spain, literally backwards, on the Camino de Santiago, because we wanted to know what “embracing the unknown” actually felt like. At first, we were constantly braced for catastrophe because we couldn’t see where we were going.
But with enough slowing down, nothing terrible happened. Instead, the unknown gradually stopped feeling like a thing to be wary of, and we found ourselves feeling lighter, freer, and more present.
Then we left Amsterdam entirely and moved to the campo of Panama, because we wanted to know what happens in real solitude, far away from anything distracting and familiar.
In that solitude, I found myself face-to-face with everything I’d been outrunning: 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.
Finding Your Ice Cream
Getting to know my dad through the stories of others, it turns out he had been struggling with existence just as much as I had. I just never saw it. After all, he was Dad: the person 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 rationalize it into oblivion.
Instead, he got on his bike and rode us to the ice cream shop.
I think about that a lot now—not about the ice cream itself, but rather the refusal to let the monochrome ‘win.’
He didn’t fight the sodium lanterns or pretend the world wasn’t turning colorless. He just decided that wasn’t a good enough reason to skip out on vanilla with sprinkles.
The other evening, sitting in the sun with my love in Panama, overlooking the heights of Volcán Barú and the day slowly turning into night, I caught myself saying,
“Lekker hé?”
I realized that in that moment, I was living in the same place my dad had been all along. Not above the world, not against it, but inside it, enjoying something nice, next to someone I love.
About Samuel van Keeken
Samuel van Keeken is a Dutch writer, artist and filmmaker based in Panama, where he co-founded Same Worldwide: a home for essays, artistic works, and retreats. At its heart is the Same Method, a framework for cultivating existential courage and meaningful action in everyday life.
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