A Mindful Journey

There’s an oyster bar tucked between a laundromat and a brothel in Palermo—run by a one-eyed chef named Giacomo who claims he once cooked for Mussolini, then tried to poison him with undercooked sea urchin. Utter nonsense, of course. But Giacomo makes a grilled octopus so transcendent it could resolve geopolitical conflict.

I mention this because life—much like Giacomo’s menu—is a mess. Chaotic. Unapologetically nonlinear. And often, deliciously irrational.

The late Irfan Khan, a man who wore melancholy like a well-fitted suit, once said in the movie Puzzle (2018):

“Life is messy. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Everything is random.”

Ah, Irfan. He understood. Life isn’t a grand design—it’s a jazz solo at a funeral. It plays offbeat. Misses the downbeat. And just when you think it’s wrapping up—it modulates and takes you somewhere entirely new.

People talk about “control” as if it’s something real. Or ask the monk who spent six weeks in a monastery outside Kyoto, learning the art of kintsugi—the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. Not to restore the original, no. To honor the fracture. That’s life. Gold-lined breakage. A beautiful disaster.

You think your choices matter? That the universe takes note of your carefully optimized LinkedIn profile and low-sodium diet?

Please.

“My success… you being here now… there is nothing we can do to control anything.”

He’s not being cynical—he’s being merciful. Freeing you from the burden of logic in a world that runs on weather patterns, moon phases, and whether a pigeon in Prague decided to poop on the right car this morning.

But then… the twist.

“When you complete a puzzle… you know that you made all the right choices. No matter how many wrong pieces you tried to fit into wrong place. But at the very end, everything makes perfect picture.”

That, my friend, is the seduction of hindsight.

You see, puzzles aren’t solved by geniuses. They’re solved by stubborn people. The kind who sit for hours trying to fit that one jagged piece that looks like it belongs but doesn’t, all while sipping a 1985 Margaux they definitely can’t afford and pretending they’re not unraveling internally.

And then one day—click.

I once knew a woman in Zanzibar—Letitia. A failed opera singer turned smuggler of endangered orchids. She believed every bad decision she made was an essential note in the aria of her life. She died fabulously—drunk, wealthy, and in a hammock.

She got it.

You try the wrong pieces. Over and over. And yet, somehow, the picture completes itself. Not in spite of the errors—but because of them. The heartbreaks, the rejections, the desperate midnight Google searches about “how to reinvent yourself before 40.” They all serve a purpose.

The chaos? Is the craftsmanship.

So, what should you do?

Buy the train ticket. Burn the blueprint. Tell them you love them—unless they’re a tax auditor, then maybe hold back. Try the piece that doesn’t seem to fit, because odds are, it belongs to your puzzle, not someone else’s box.

At the end, you’ll step back, wine in hand, and look at the beautiful monstrosity you built from randomness. And it’ll be breathtaking. Imperfect. Flawed.

But yours.

And frankly, that’s more than most people ever get.