Prologue
We can feel the ground beneath us bearing the sweet fruit of a long life’s work. Our four shoots from the trunk have long since flown the nest, ready to hurl themselves into life’s whirl and find their own banks. And meanwhile—yes, meanwhile—we’ve dived headfirst into life’s fifth, formidable phase. Now is when the sails truly open: when the wisdom, scars, and triumphs gathered over decades take shape. It’s a season not of merely existing, but of making—building, planting deep roots, and letting everything our lived experience can offer the world come fully into bloom. The essence of what we’ve learned must finally leave the drawer and go to work.
Life races along here in South Africa with a wild, unruly energy, woven together with a tangle of passports and tickets to far-off places. The world calls, and we answer. A new, wonderful axis has appeared: our daughter and her family have settled in the United States, which naturally pulls us across the Atlantic again and again. New adventures always seem to be waiting just around the corner.
In the midst of all this motion, I leap once more—into a new chapter with the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. My training as an architect and my years as a project manager spring to life on Danish building projects around the globe. To shape places under foreign skies—what a privilege. And alongside those global sites, I rediscover old artistic flames. Brushes dance over canvas as I capture my children and grandchildren; glass colors melt into new mosaics that catch and scatter the light. Creativity is bubbling.
And then there are the words. A long-smoldering dream flares bright: to catch and set down the adventures, thoughts, and oddities life has offered. It becomes a whole series, now taking the shape of a fourth book. It bears the title The Sixth Chapter—the name for that chapter in life’s larger story we do not yet know or fully grasp, but which awaits us all.
Before we reach it, we linger at the threshold of what lies directly ahead: the fifth chapter—our otium. Imagine a phase dedicated to freedom. Freedom of thought; freedom to let life’s last, deepest dreams not merely simmer but burst into a kaleidoscope of possibilities. I can already see it—and you will too—that they will. They do. They’re unfolding now.
The Price of Intensity
Looking back, my life is no straight line but a thousand tracks twisting through time and countries—projects, journeys, meetings, collapses, and resurrections. I’ve moved through more than forty nations, flown the equivalent of thirty-seven times around the globe, lived over twenty-five years abroad, and worked as architect, artist, entrepreneur, and adventurer. I’ve written books, painted pictures, made glass mosaics, and built things both literal and metaphorical. I have loved deeply, failed thoroughly, and tried to understand what it all amounts to.
Through it all, one force drove me: intensity. Not conflict—charge. That electric sense of being on: standing where something could go wrong, and yet everything might suddenly come together. That’s where I’ve felt most alive. Which is why the merely safe has never been enough.
Intensity is addictive. Not figuratively—literally. When it vanishes, restlessness arrives, then darkness, then emptiness. I’ve fought to keep them at bay, and alcohol was often my weapon—not for pleasure, but as a shield. I functioned. But always near the edge.
It sounds lonely—and at times it was. Which is why joining the Los Angeles Adventurers Club was a relief. There I met others who couldn’t help but challenge life: mountaineers, expedition leaders, explorers. For the first time, restlessness and the hunger for adventure needed no apology.
Only later, with acceptance into the International Society for Philosophical Enquiry—the Thousanders, so called because only one in a thousand qualifies—did I find an intellectual fellowship that truly mirrored something in me. ISPE is not a club for “clever heads.” It’s a room for people who cannot stop examining the world—ethically, philosophically, humanly. A circle that seeks not only answers but the right questions.
High intelligence sounds like an advantage. It can be a yoke. It brings insight and presence—and also distance. When thought outruns conversation and loneliness begins in the midst of company; when you constantly sense what lies beneath the words and can seldom simply be. Many gifted people quietly struggle to fit—not from arrogance, but because they’re oversensitive to the unsaid.
I recognized that in Hemingway, in Karen Blixen, in Tove Ditlevsen, and Bruce Chatwin—people who sought intensity and paid a price. I’ve lived in that same field, somewhere between clarity and chaos, and tried to transform it into what can be shared: books, art, story.
Perhaps no one finds perfect peace. Perhaps we’re not meant to. Perhaps it’s not about finding answers but carrying our unrest with dignity—and letting it lead us where we would never have gone otherwise. These four volumes are the result of that journey: my attempt to understand and to pass something on—to my children and grandchildren; to anyone who feels slightly out of step with the world; to you, reading this. And who knows—perhaps a new adventure already calls. Perhaps The Sixth Chapter will one day have a fifth volume after all.
Have I Understood Myself?
The final question is no longer how it all happened—but what it meant. And beyond that: whether, amid life’s dance and storms, its absurdities and truths, I ever learned to understand myself.
It may sound odd, but I was only seven or eight when I first thought of “collecting” my life—not to display it, but to understand it. To remember backward and dream forward. To be able to look back and know what had happened, while also launching small boats into the stream of thought—visions and fantasies of the life that still lay ahead. I imagined what it would be like to be grown—what it would feel like to be me, further on, out there in the nameless future.
Strange as it seems, that early pattern—thinking in this way—has shaped my life more than anyone would normally credit a childhood notion. You could almost say, as H.C. Andersen might have put it: to dream is to become. Over time the sense grew in me that thought and dream themselves feed the future—like the way dry rot carries its own moisture from unseen sources to nourish its advance. Odd comparison, yes—but the analogy holds. In the absence of a better one, I’ll use it.
And here at the long story’s edge, I must admit: in a peculiar way, I’ve always reached my goals. Not without effort, but without grinding toil. Life often came to meet me. You could say it fell into my lap—not because I sat and waited, but because, somehow, I kept working on ground that was mine. Where my deepest interest lay, energy followed. The fun factor was never absent; it was part of the drive.
Does that mean I understood myself?
I’ve wrestled with that question—before writing these books, and especially along the way. What does it even mean to “understand oneself”? Is it a state? A conclusion? A peace that arrives? Or just another idea—another boat on the water?
I think it’s something else. Not mastering all one’s crooked edges and contradictions, but letting them exist. Not finding the answer, but recognizing the question—and enduring it.
All my life I’ve tried to learn why I was as I was. I thought too much, felt too strongly, saw too far. I was shy and felt wrong. I was bored in school—too many thoughts, too few exits for them. And even then—perhaps especially then—I began to watch myself, as a kind of inner witness. I’ve done so ever since.
Understanding didn’t arrive as revelation. It came in flashes. In Papua, where I let myself be dressed in a penis gourd and stepped into the light, pale and utterly bare—and felt the world could no longer touch me. In Dhaka, where I stood amid the traffic and felt at home in chaos. In Pretoria, where the night noise of clubs beneath our apartment gave way to the hush of the bush. In a modest office at the ministry, where I suddenly felt part of something larger.
There were the other times, too—the darker ones. Days when I collapsed; when fear took over and I couldn’t even buy a train ticket without dissolving. I’ve known breakdowns so deep it felt as if my identity were being peeled away. Perhaps it was there, in those corners, that understanding began—not as insight but as surrender. As acceptance.
Carl Gustav Jung thought we approach our true selves only in life’s second half. Søren Kierkegaard wrote that life must be understood backward but lived forward. I’ve carried both with me—not as doctrine, but as small lamps in the dark. Understanding is no point you reach; it’s a landscape you learn to move within.
To me, understanding means seeing oneself without distance—not necessarily without criticism, but without judgment. Bearing one’s contradictions, stumbles, relapses—and standing up anyway. Still saying: This is me. I’m here.
So—have I understood myself?
No, not as one who solves a mystery. And yes, as one who has learned to live with it. I can look at myself now with a touch of warmth: You did the best you could. And that was enough.
I have nothing left to prove, nothing left to explain—only to be. Perhaps that is the point.
Understanding is not mastery; it is moving to one’s own rhythm—not always in time, but in tune. To live in conversation with one’s inner life, and to know that what cannot be explained can still be carried.
So I do not close this book as a final ending. I simply place a period—for now. Life has a way of finding new chapters, even when you think you’re done writing. And who knows—perhaps there’s still a small boat waiting out there: a new idea, a new journey, a new version of me.
If I’ve learned anything, it may be this: life begins—and goes on—in the dream.