The Plan

In mid-June my wife told me that our marriage, it seemed, hadn’t worked out.

We’d been married seven years. It was my second marriage. I was far from Bali when she said it — that matters for what comes next.

The first thing I did was sit down and make a plan.

I know how that sounds. Cold. Mechanical. It isn’t — it’s just that this wasn’t my first collapse. I’ve lost things of this size before, and those losses taught me something specific: in the first days after the structure of your life comes down, there are exactly two things you have to get right. Everything else is detail.

The first one: accept, completely, that there is no way back. Not “maybe we’ll work it out.” Not “let’s see how it goes.” The way back doesn’t exist. The only way is forward, and forward runs through the pain, not around it. That’s where the focus has to go — not on rescuing what’s gone, but on walking through what’s coming.

The second one: change your context. Physically. Leave the place where it happened, and leave for a long time.

This rule works at every scale, by the way — not only in catastrophe. It’s my working tool for ordinary life. Before any important decision I change context at minimum by walking into another room — ideally the room where I’ve made many decisions before, because the room itself nudges my state in that direction. And when I catch myself stuck in some emotion, in some state, the best remedy I know is a walk: twenty or thirty minutes, a familiar route, and the endpoint matters — it should be a place that’s anchored, for me, to a good state.

But when the loss is large, the change of context has to be radical and long. I know why I trust this, because I’ve moved a lot in recent years and watched the same thing happen every time. At first the new place feels foreign, illegible. Then you walk the same routes, ride the same roads, week after week, month after month — and something gets rewired. You put down roots without deciding to; the place soaks into you. Your state changes slowly, maybe imperceptibly — but steadily, and inevitably. That’s the whole point of leaving: the new place pulls you out of the state that produced the situation in the first place.

Ideally you go somewhere you feel good, somewhere that holds you. Over a lifetime you accumulate a few places like that, if you’re lucky. I have several. The first is my hometown — not an option this time. The second, and the strongest, is Bali. I lived there for years, and Ubud was something like my spiritual home.

But I didn’t want to live in Ubud itself. I wanted somewhere new. So I did what I do: I opened a map of Bali and got strategic about it. I studied the traffic. I compared districts. The requirements were simple. A gym I could reach in ten to fifteen minutes, because I’d be going every day. A surf beach within twenty or thirty, because I’d be going a few times a week. And Ubud within an hour, because I’d be going once a week, and Bali traffic can turn an hour into three.

The answer turned out to be Babakan, a village just inland from Canggu. And there I found my place.

Why Ubud once a week? Because of the thing I can only describe as church — in the sense I understand church. Kirtan and ecstatic dance: a room full of good-hearted people doing something together that lifts everyone in it. At least once a week I put myself in that room. Not for the philosophy. For the people, and for what happens when you sing or move together with them.

The Canggu area also happens to have the best gyms on Bali — better, honestly, than most gyms in Europe. Mine has first-class equipment, a new open-air 25-meter pool, a sauna, a hammam, and my non-negotiable ritual: the ice bath and the hot one, every visit.

Then there’s where I live. I call it my Balinese penthouse. In reality it’s an ordinary guesthouse — I just rented the entire third floor, the top one, with a huge open veranda. Eight hundred euros a month, if you’re wondering. Penthouse, Bali edition: rice fields on every side, farmers, construction sites, the usual island chaos. But it’s open space. I spend the whole day in fresh air — working on the couch, doing yoga on the veranda.

One more element, and it’s a load-bearing one: mushroom trips. I don’t do therapy. I think sitting with a psychologist, digging through the past week after week, does more harm than good — for me it’s a waste of time, and I’ve watched it become a way of life rather than a way out. What I’ve found far more valuable is a deep psilocybin trip taken rarely, deliberately, and under strict rules. Not recreation — work. Those trips are part of the structure this plan stands on.

That was the plan I wrote down, a few days after the conversation.

Then I bought the ticket.