I’ve been thinking a lot about time lately. The way it flows as both a physical quantity and a perceptual marker of our passing, if not fleeting, existence. The ultimate carrier of change, continually separating the future from the past through the infinite richness of the present. Cementing what has happened into immutable, historic fact, while promising unknowable, endlessly diverse possibilities for what has yet to occur. Despite the seemingly constant character of this arrow of time and the way it affects us, I increasingly believe that there are certain turning points in each of our lives; moments where a clear separation between our past and future chapters might prompt us to consider where we’ve been and which way we’re headed, a bit more attentively. And for me, now is one of those moments.

Looking back, I can say with sincerity that my initial arrival to Denmark, in the fall of 2017, marked the beginning of one of the most joyful, turbulent and ultimately introspective periods of my life. I had just come back from a year-long backpacking trip around the world and had decided to move to Denmark and live once again with Maria, who’d found a job there as a doctor after graduating medical school in Poland. I had no job waiting for me, or even a precise idea of what I wanted to work with, just the conviction that things would work out, for no other reason than that I needed them to.

I applied for a PhD position in electrical engineering pretty much on a whim, having already considered and been rejected for various enviable positions such as hostel front desk manager, dating app web developer, and all sorts of elaborate-sounding startup-employed roles. So you can imagine my surprise, and the boost to my intellectual ego, when after only a single interview I was offered a three-year PhD scholarship in hearing aid research at the best technical university in Scandinavia. Of course, as most PhD graduates will quickly confirm, I had no idea of the brutal and relentless intensity that embarking on a research project of this nature would impose on my professional and personal life. Above all, I was happy that I’d found a challenging and extremely interesting purpose that could justify my life in Denmark and complement the shared future Maria and I were attempting to solidify. Even if during the first six months, I had to leave our countryside apartment every day at 5am for a 2.5-hour one-way commute to the university campus near Copenhagen, never getting back home before 8.30pm, before we eventually moved to the capital.

Our plans to remain in Denmark for the foreseeable future meant that we both needed to make efforts to integrate into Danish society, a challenge which is absolutely not for the faint of heart. Denmark is one of the wealthiest nations on the planet, and by many metrics also one of the most advanced. As a Scandinavian country, its implementation of various social democratic policies under the Nordic model has meant that Danes generally enjoy a very high standard of living, including universal health care, free education and widespread support for collective bargaining. Because the state cares for its citizens to such a profound degree - its remarkably high public spending budget mainly funded by equally high taxes - people growing up in Denmark are empowered to chart their own destiny, free of many of the financial, educational and medical constraints that inhabitants of other countries might face.

Simultaneously, and perhaps ironically, this state-of-the-art, deeply social societal model is increasingly delivering one of the most individualized and homogenized cultural contexts I have ever witnessed. Scandinavia’s remarkable and admirable acceptance of people’s freedom of identity and expression is primarily made possible by a great number of unwritten rules for public conduct, which serve to remove the occurrence of any potentially uncomfortable interaction simply by instructing people to interact as little as possible. As a consequence, it is rather uncommon for a Dane to spontaneously venture outside the realm of longstanding friendships and family ties, making it tremendously difficult for a newcomer to truly get to know the Denmark that Danes inhabit. It can feel as though there is an invisible wall separating foreigners’ lives from those of the natives, even if they both walk in the same streets, visit the same cafés or work at the same offices.

Nevertheless, we did manage to gradually make some lovely friends, Danish ones included, several years of a global pandemic notwithstanding. My daily rhythm steadily grew more dense, largely due to the responsibilities at university, requiring activities to be scheduled ever more precisely and further ahead. I felt like I was increasingly adhering to the life befitting a person my age and context, instilling in me mixed feelings of protected comfort and gentle suffocation. And so, having completed my degree a little over three years later, Maria and I decided to set out again traveling, once more taking a break from sedentary life to go explore the world together. It would become another marvelous year-long journey to so many new and different places everywhere. It would also turn out to be our final trip as a couple.

It’s fair to say that I spent much of my final two years in Denmark balancing sensations of crushing loss and daunting renewal. At the same time attempting to come to terms with the ending of the most important relationship of my life, and figuring out what my now entirely-open-ended future would look like. Appreciating that no thing in life is eternal, not in a nihilistic sense where nothing matters any longer but rather optimistically, bringing an intensified focus to what’s happening in my present, on the sharpest edge of the precipice plunging the past into the future.

It is this kind of life I believe I need to live now, at least for a while. And while Denmark has been a generous home, with so many people I know and cherish, it’s not the right place for this next chapter. I honestly have no idea where that place might be, but I’m hopeful that I’ll find it. By being on the road again, by acting as proactively and creatively as I can, by playing music and by allowing myself to be temporarily untethered from any expectations besides my own.

Now is the time.

January 10th, 2025