From an aging G-Wagon to the sacred peaks of Mount Athos, the quest for home and meaning unfolds in motion.

One thing we liked about living in France while our children were younger was the mid-term school holidays.

These are two weeks in the middle of the school season in both the fall and spring, and many parents use them to send their kids with their grandparents or sign them up for camps and other activities. We used them to travel as a family instead.

In mid-October 2018, we decided to use the first mid-term school holidays during the traditional All-Saints Holiday (“Vacances de la Toussaint”) to take a road trip across Europe by car and Ferry from Paris to Southern Athens and back.

This time, however, we didn’t travel south to Spain. Instead, we ventured east in a quest to solve some of the recurrent questions that appear on the site and channel: the meaning of home—and the nature of our identity as a family with a North American and European soul but also a Mediterranean one.

Plus, isn’t the weather in California (and the approach to many things in life, from culture to diet) also Mediterranean?

Keeping the basics nurtured

Travel has also helped us to create our own sense of resilience and shared meaning as things around us changed, and not always for the better. Instead of becoming a part of social media agendas planned by others or exploiting resentment in exchange for engagement, we thought it was healthy to expose our kids to as many places and cultures as possible.

Everything would be pretty straightforward during that trip—or at least we thought so. Only we were driving a very old car that had already failed on the road before: my 1989 G-Wagon 2030 GE, with its residual austere allure still intact and mainly produced in the original Graz, Austria plant founded by Johann Puch.

I did like to drive it, its steering wheel, its primitive but elegant dashboard, and the fact that I could understand and fix any issues coming from the simplified fuse box and the 4-cylinder engine. Many things had failed when reaching their lengthy life cycle, but the essentials were smooth.

If there’s something irrational I’ve pushed our family into over the years, it is convincing them to take road trips in such an old, anti-convenience car. I don’t regret a single second of it, and I kind of miss that car, which I now associate with our children being younger and us making things happen on the go.

Adventures aboard a lovely clunker

The car was so spacious inside (lacking the senseless gigantic armrest consoles of modern cars) that Kirsten would sometimes go from her front passenger seat to the back of the car looking for the computer, or a cable, or (most times) food for us and the kids.

The whole enterprise was very Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig’s quest for the “metaphysics of quality”: you push too hard when the car is still warming up, you may get into trouble; you decide to climb the Alps a bit too aggressively, you may need to bring that engine temperature down; the warm or cold air (forget A/C) doesn’t work, you may stop for a second and swap the fuse underneath the steering wheel, and it will work right away.

In retrospect, I think my intention was anchored in what Nietzsche called amor fati, or the sense that time goes by and there are only a handful of times you’ll be given to travel as a family as your children are growing and demand their own autonomy, which ends making a shared schedule more and more complex. I wanted to have an enchanted experience of those trips, materially and spiritually.

It suited us. I just understood the car, its sound, and its symptoms. Now, I drive a contemporary black box that doesn’t fail (until it does), and then you have to rely on shops that forgot the old trade and on diagnostic machines for everything. I don’t drive an EV yet, but direct transmission is to old-school driving, which is what an AI interaction is to a human one. Everything feels cheap and orthopedic. I guess things evolve, and we aren’t supposed to keep up the perks of yesteryear.

By road across the Alps and ferry into Greece via Ancona

More on what modernity gets wrong as we roar into the singularity: I recently rewatched Out of Africa from a whole different perspective. I just focused on the outfit and the way the undeterred Romantic Denys (Robert Redford) travels around in a refined yet rugged way, with an approach to camping that combines practicality with an unmatched appreciation for comfort and elegance.

He wears light, breathable fabrics, uses sturdy yet well-worn boots, and has space to bring with him folded chairs and tables, sturdy yet real cutlery and tableware (!), crystal glasses, and books plus a gramophone (all the goodies the iPhone has to offer when trying to have a great time in the wild, none of the baddies).

It took us several days to reach Greece. We crossed Switzerland and met with some friends on the other side of the border, overlooking some of the most enchanting parts of the Italian Alps. It took us a while to find a certain equilibrium between the road trip needs (that is, keep on rolling when one gets a bit too comfortable somewhere) and drove to Ancona, one of the harbor cities in the Italian Adriatic with a ferry connection to Greece, and from there we landed in Igoumenitsa.

Given that it was late October, most of our travel companions were either French families doing a similar trip to ours, or (mostly) truck drivers avoiding the Balkans to transport goods between the core of Europe and Greece (and Turkey). There were also Italian and Greek families with a connection to either country, and our children managed to become friends and play with some of them while aboard.

As we left Igoumenitsa and entered the enchanting interior mountains beyond Ioannina, we discovered the Aromanian (Vlach) villages of Epirus, where some old people still speak a local Eastern-Romance language, the Megleno-Romanian.

Our day in Metsovo was especially lovely, and our children felt at some sort of imaginary “home” that, for them back then, meant a mismatch of Catalan and Southern France villages visited over the years since they were born, feeling perhaps the proximity of Mediterranean exotism (common to those born in other parts of the Mediterranean).

Ladinos of Thessaloniki and a views of Mount Athos

But we didn’t enter fairyland-level territory until we arrived in Meteora. And it wasn’t easy. Before reaching the region with stunning rock formations and ancient monasteries built atop them, we’d stayed several days in the country’s second city, Thessaloniki, which brought so many references to me that didn’t ring to Kirsten or our children (for one, basketball matches between FC Barcelona and the local teams were legendary in the late 80s and early 90s, when Nikos Galis and Juan Antonio San Epifanio “Epi” were at their peak on Aris and FC Barcelona, respectively). The city was somehow closer to my experience.

There was also something more with Greek basketball. It turns out that, in my high school third year, we traveled to Greece as an end-of-year trip. We were sixteen-year-old kids going in big groups around Athens, and one night, we happened to be walking near the local basketball stadium (where an Italian team, perhaps Scavolini Pesaro or Benetton Treviso, had played Panathinaikos); Greek hooligans mistook us for Italian Tifosi. I was ahead, so I was one of the two of us who got a bit roughed up (I got a punch in the face). Fortunately, when they took our wallet and saw we were Spaniards from Barcelona, everything was cool.

Reflecting on that event I had as a teenager a little over 20 years later made me think about many things. I wasn’t a tourist in a foreign place, after all. If Europe was anything more than one abstract idea, people like me, wondering about its meaning while walking in places like the ancient walls of Thessaloniki up in the hills, were a part of it.

It brought all the allure of the Ancient World (Alexander the Great, Byzantium, the Ottoman flourishing, one of the biggest colonies of Sephardic Jews speaking Ladino in the world, wiped out by the Nazis…). I could have walked for weeks on the streets that didn’t exist anymore, trying to speculate about the history of families expelled from Spain centuries before to settle in Thessaloniki, then a flourishing Ottoman city.

But again, the road trip has laws, and we couldn’t get too comfortable, so we traveled towards the three peninsulas, spreading into the Aegean Sea, not far from the border from Turkey. From the middle peninsula among the three, a friend who is originally from Thessaloniki but lived in London pointed at a big mountain on the peninsula to the east.

“There you see it! Isn’t it wonderful? it’s Mount Athos.”
I asked if that was the same Mount Athos where the patriarch of Constantinople had set the epicenter of Eastern Orthodox monasticism.
“That’s right. That’s the place.”
We joked about the fact that, still today, women are barred from entering sacred places.
Kirsten asked if Mount Athos was still a big deal.
Our friend looked at us and replied:
“I can’t go there,” she said, “but Vladimir Putin visited in 2016 to celebrate the 1,000 years.”
What thousand years? —we asked.
“One thousand years of uninterrupted presence of monks at Mount Athos.”

Gas pump anxiety

That meant that Putin must have traveled to the peninsula by boat, like anyone who wants to travel there, for the enclave is an autonomous center without road access.

We couldn’t see the monasteries of the Athos peninsula from afar, but our genuine interest in the topic was redeemed a couple of days later. Looking at the mythical mountain afar from the shore, we left the small village of Ormos Panagias at 5:30 PM, October 25, 2018 (according to the metadata of the last smartphone picture I took before leaving the place). We were driving a clunker but managed to cover the distance to Meteora, where we had a place to sleep that night, in a few hours.

However, we stumbled upon something unexpected: used to driving on European roads around big cities or highways; we assumed that one could find open gas stations anywhere at around 10 PM. We were wrong. The car tank was low, and there was no sign of an open gas station around. When we saw we were getting closer to a biggish town, we thought we’d be luckier but found all stores and gas pumps closed.

Everything was pitch dark, and, as a joke, we only saw a couple of street dogs crossing the deserted street. There they were—I thought—the original cynics (in ancient Greek, kynós—dog—is the root of Cynicism—which means “dog-like—, the philosophical school started by Diogenes of Sinope).

Fortunately for us, a man who looked like he had just finished his work day at a nearby place parked the car next to us and headed to a nearby apartment building. I hopped out of the car and talked to him in English, which he barely understood. But my question was straightforward: signaling the car (with my family inside) and explaining that we needed gas badly, there was little else needed for context.

He said no with his head; everything was closed. I was already about to ask him whether there was a place to sleep still open in the whole area, which I was beginning to doubt. But then he seemed a bit conflicted by some afterthought. He finally said that there was, in fact, a gas station nearby that remained open, run by an industrial area that needed it for its trucks.

There was a problem, however. It was complicated to get to. I offered him my phone to type it on the map or at least locate it, but he said it wouldn’t show up. So, a bit against his common sense (he seemed exhausted), and just to help us, he offered to bring us there. It was indeed a bizarre and tucked-away gas station. That meant we were sleeping in Meteora that night.

We drove back and offered our new friend money, which he refused. I remembered then that a family we had visited in beautiful Varese, Northern Italy, days before had offered our children a bag of delicate pastries, which we kept in the back for a special occasion. Our friend from Larissa couldn’t refuse the Italian pastries.

We arrived at the Meteora area when it was pitch dark, with the kids sleeping in the car. So we got the keys to our room, put the children in their beds for the night, unloaded the car, and went to sleep.

Anchorites

The morning after, a magic world unfolded for us all. While running around the hills nearby and reaching the village of Kalabaka, the area’s unique geology reminded me of Montserrat, the symbolic multi-peaked mountain in central Catalonia and the site of a sanctuary and Benedictine abbey: monasteries perching impossibly on clifftops, a sense of cultural and religious heritage, and tourists —even in late October.

But nothing could stop our awe as we looked at the gravity-defying monasteries sitting on Studio Ghibli-like cliffs for centuries and still hosting people who voluntarily withdrew from society in a quest for spirituality.

Our second morning in the area was even more shocking. As I visited some tucked-away boulders, I noticed many humble hermit caves carved on the vertical rock —tens, perhaps hundreds of them. I quickly tried to research their origin, and I found out about the Hermit Caves of Badovas. Perched high up on the cliff, those wooden ruins protruding from the rock were the reminder of the physical and spiritual effort of many individuals centuries back.

Were these hermits trying to hide from prosecution, or some sort of insurance policy against the convulsed changes during ancient, Byzantine, and Ottoman times? Both things at once, it turned out: like the gnostic hermits looking for protection and solace in the Egyptian desert, the Meteora hermits that built the perched cave homes of Badovas were early Christians often fleeing prosecution.

I read somewhere that the term “anchorite” (from the Greek ἀναχωρέω anachōreō, “to withdraw,” “to depart into the country outside the circumvallate city”) named solitary people who were not quite hermits. To them, having a humble place in which to practice their beliefs was a foundational element of their quest, for they lived in the solitude of an “anchorhold” (or “anchorage”), usually a small hut or “cell.” Sometimes, these cells were small caves on rock boulders, reached by precarious ladders hanging vertically.

Finding the right amount of escapism

Escapism, it seems, flourishes in times of crisis. There’s a reason why, in moments of self-perceived turmoil and instability, people who remain thoughtful and clear-sighted don’t use their leisure time (for others, time of introspection or study) feeding on the anxiety-inducing events of the moment.

When the disillusionment with mainstream society reaches a tipping point, many people consider it healthier to cultivate themselves and look for better times, especially when the flow of events is strong, carrying momentum and support. To try to stem the tide can feel useless. And it might be.

Consider what many people are doing today: perceiving (rightly so) that the stakes are high, and people keep updating their feeds to consume as much content that will trigger them as possible.

Now, contrast that attitude with that of Marcus Aurelius (April 26, 121 CE-March 17, 180 CE) by the time he was writing Book 2, Section 11 of his Meditations:

“You have power over your mind—not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength.”

At that precise moment (170 CE), the Emperor was commanding the Marcomannic Wars, a brutal, years-long conflict against Germanic and Sarmatian tribes who had breached the Roman frontier, sacking cities and killing a sizeable percentage of the frontier population. At the same time, a devastating plague (the Antonine Plague) was ravaging the Empire overall, severely weakening economic and social structures.

Despite all that, Marcus Aurelius dedicated his free time to focus on internal mastery, not external catastrophe. And, unlike many privileged “spectators” in today’s real and perceived instabilities, Marcus Aurelius couldn’t simply look another way, for he was responsible for many of the atrocities that were meant to block other atrocities.

Take the zeitgeist with a grain of salt

Instead of falling into the despair, derangement, or absolute folly that affected many high-ranked people before and after him, Marcus Aurelius stole some time from sleep to write a collection of afterthoughts that were coherent with his philosophy of life: that true power comes from within and not from reacting against what one or another “engineer of chaos” has to say or do today or tomorrow.

That way—he thought—he’d be fresh and ready to ponder important things during actual life-or-death situations for many. If today, almost two millennia later, we think of him and his Meditations as an exercise of sublime control of the short-term urges to calmly win the battle of the long-term (and that of posterity, too), it’s because he didn’t take the bait of feeding on everyday grudges.

The Meditations aren’t the only little piece of long-term wisdom and bliss coming from people who experienced an era of turmoil and managed to do two things at once: engaging in their time, holding their ground when they needed to, and also going into physical and intellectual withdrawal to try to decipher the crucial things of their moment, choosing timeless thinking instead of falling prey of action-reaction dynamics.

Over history, many people who had a long-lasting impact on culture used introspection as some sort of secret weapon; to them, engaging in everyday events and reacting to them was like kryptonite to Clark Kent. Instead of engaging in endless fights, they purposely chose not to dwell on the turmoil of their times but to cultivate a long-term vision through study or creation.

The Spinoza way

Descendant of Sephardic Jews of Portuguese origin, Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) was excommunicated from his synagogue in Amsterdam, which was as bad as it could get for him. Instead of engaging in provocation and dying a victim of a duel in some dark alley, Spinoza chose a modest life as a lens grinder and, “on the side,” an independent philosopher.

Friends of him would have laughed at the prospect of thinking that Spinoza, the heretic, would transcend his place and time by writing on things without direct utility, such as human behavior. His choice gave us the Ethics, perhaps the best rational exploration of human emotions, freedom, and God. Instead of becoming a small-time reactionary swine commenting on the conflicts of his time, Spinoza decided to talk to his soul instead.

There are many other examples, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) enduring the Napoleonic Wars—and choosing to talk about the universal concerns of men like him instead of whining about the nasty things going on every day around him— to J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973), one among many spectators of the atrocities of World War I and the rise of totalitarianism, who built his own rich fantasy world (first and foremost, for him, his kids, and close friends) reflecting a timeless vision of heroism, loss, and renewal instead of becoming a cynic pundit of political commentary.

We may know this, but many find it hard to elude the delicious torture of festering in the articles and commentaries speculating about things that are going awry, or are about to go awry, or should go awry. They forget that the information they consume is meant to trigger them and keep them engaged, not caring for carrying any real substance or value.

Secondary effects of digital escapism & news stalking

We live in an era of content abundance, and also one of low value per unit of information: texts tend towards clickbait, podcasts are conversations that tend towards Fidel Castro-level of lengthy, unbearable verbosity, short videos tend towards memes and feel-good clips, YouTube long videos bank it all on ridiculous promises via their thumbnail and title, and platforms optimize it all to improve contextual advertising.

In this environment, few things have the quality or weight to survive fifty seconds of fame, and only those working on their craft, irrespective of algorithms, seem to keep their sanity while making content. From experience, independent content creators who manage to express their voice with quality content that holds high information and quality versus noise rates aren’t themselves heavy consumers of the contextual content environment where they are perceived to belong.

In other words, it’s difficult to transcend the chit-chat of today’s turmoil environment by entering the hyper-competitive race to the bottom that algorithms incentivize (to their advantage). Perhaps, a few years from now, we’ll see more clearly where the value lies in the entertainment we consume. Many people will argue that all they want to do is to watch, listen, or “read” (skim through?) something that will allow them to “escape” their everyday conundrums, if only for a little while.

If this holds true for at least a sizeable percentage of people, the race to “feel numb” while scrolling through doesn’t seem to fulfill any promise of self-emancipation and/or self-actualization. Quite the contrary.

There’re different types of conceptual tower (not only ivory ones)

But we haven’t invented cultural escapism at the beginning of 2025. Ask the French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592), considered the father of the essay as a literary genre. Amid the turmoil of the era, he was destined to live, when most of his neighbors were killing each other during the atrocious Wars of Religion (including pogroms and massacres like the one in St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1572), Montaigne, a notable from the region of Bourdeaux, couldn’t himself practice the ostrich strategy of entirely ignoring the senselessness and cruelty around him.

Instead, he engaged in public affairs when he needed to, holding his ground, but opted for writing about timeless affairs, understanding that many people adapt to the circumstances with no more principles than their immediate perception of personal interests or what others around them tell is essential or popular.

They will state the contrary of what they hold without blinking an eye if that’s what they feel serves them.

Montaigne isolated himself in his tower to write essays and read the classics, and the strategy paid off for him and those who still read him.

And, like him, many other thoughtful people understood that they couldn’t change the trends around them on their own. They could decide how to react to such events, however, choosing optimism and hope in the future while insisting on the necessity of action.

Or, put by Antonio Gramsci:

“Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”