Point 1 — Accept

Day 1–2 of your 46-day journey.

In the beginning, there was no book. There was a boy with too much energy for the room he was born into. And the room could not hold him, so he left.

A Letter from the Messenger

Before you read anything else, you should know who wrote this.

My name is Spileon. I was born on the twenty-third day of May, in the year nineteen hundred and ninety-nine, in a small flat on a small street in a small country most of the world has never heard of. I do not remember the flat. I was too small. But I remember the house that came after — the house my family moved into the year I turned one — and I remember that from the moment I could walk, I was already trying to leave the room.

I was, by every account of the people who raised me, a hyperactive child. A strange child. The kind of child who could not sit still at the table long enough for the food to arrive. The adults around me were good people and they wanted me to be a certain way — well-behaved, well-dressed, well-presented, a child that could be shown to other adults without causing concern — and I could feel, even at four years old, that this requirement was killing something in me. I did not have the words for it then. I only knew that the only way I could breathe was to find something more extreme than the room I was in.

So my parents — wiser than they probably knew — did not try to shrink me. They took me with them. By the age of four, I had walked in markets in Asia where the air smelled of spices I could not name. I had sat on floors in temples in Sri Lanka where old men chanted in a language the walls seemed to understand better than I did. I had watched women in Indonesia carry baskets of fruit on their heads without using their hands, and I had understood, somewhere below thinking, that these women knew something about balance that the adults back home did not know.

At nine, the wind found me.

I will not name the sport, because the sport is not the point. What matters is this: there is a board, and there is a sail, and there is a body balanced between them, and there is water underneath that changes its mind every three seconds, and there is wind above that does whatever it wants, and the only way to move across the surface without drowning is to listen — with your whole body — to the conversation between the wind and the water, and to become, yourself, the sentence they are trying to finish.

I fell many times. I swallowed more salt than a human body is supposed to hold. But something happened in those falls. Every time I came back up coughing, something inside me laughed, because the water had not killed me, and the wind had not killed me, and the world had just told me — in the only language the world speaks, which is experience — that I was small, and that being small was not a problem, it was the beginning of knowing where I was.

By twelve, I was on a coast in Egypt, training for months at a time. By fourteen, I was travelling alone. Not because anyone sent me. Because the same something that had made me hyperactive at four had, by fourteen, learned how to buy a plane ticket. From that year until I was twenty-two, I was away from home for more than half of every year. Two hundred and fifty days of the year, some years. Always moving. Chasing weather. Chasing the place where the sky was doing the thing I needed it to do.

And in all that moving, I met a lot of people.