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Lofty Work: Distillation (Revised)

 A genie offers me a perfect space for reading and writing. The kind of wish people usually waste on views, leather chairs, and Instagram lighting. I start somewhere else. Before furniture, before walls, before shelves groaning under the weight of books, the first requirement is control. Control of attention. Control of intrusion. Control of noise. Silence is not an aesthetic choice. It is a functional one. Without silence, thought cannot complete a sentence. It gets interrupted, diluted, sold off in fragments. So yes, the place is quiet. Not reverent quiet. Not sacred hush. Working quiet. The kind that allows an idea to survive long enough to be interrogated. Then come the books. Lots of them. Not decorative. Used. Marked. Dog-eared. Books that argue with each other across the room. Books that disagree with me. Manuals, memoirs, theology, engineering, history. Raw material. If I cannot reach out and pull down a contradiction at arm’s length, the space is lying to me. But book...
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Leonard Cohen in Umm Al Quwain

 Leonard Cohen does not belong in a scented candle aisle or whispered over a yoga mat. He belongs where rules are enforced, money talks, desire is policed, and people learn to live with contradictions without pretending they are resolved. Which is why he works just fine in Umm Al Quwain. I am not interested in the soft, romanticized version of Leonard Cohen that gets trotted out to soundtrack heartbreak montages. That Cohen is a caricature. The real one wrote about love without apology, faith without comfort, and power without flinching. He understood systems. He understood restraint. He understood what happens when the rules don’t care how you feel. That puts him closer to life in the UAE than most people are willing to admit. Umm Al Quwain is not Dubai. It does not sell fantasy. It does not pretend to be a global playground. It is a place where things are allowed, disallowed, tolerated, or ignored depending on context, timing, and who is watching. You learn quickly that free...
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You’re a Winner

 If I won one billion dollars tomorrow, tax free, the first thing I would not do is announce it to the world. Sudden wealth attracts noise. I have had enough of noise. The second thing I would do is sit still. For a long time. Not out of shock, but out of respect. Money at that scale is not spending money. It is stewardship capital. It can either become a blessing that compounds quietly for generations, or a curse that evaporates in public view. I would start by building a structure, not a lifestyle. Trusts first. Family trusts that protect assets from impulse, predators, and bad timing. Clear rules. Clear governance. No heroics. Wealth that survives needs fences as much as it needs fields. Then land. Not speculative land. Useful land. Places that produce something real. Agriculture. Water rights. Modest but well built homes designed to last, not impress. A sense of place that cannot be cancelled by a market swing or a visa stamp. Land anchors families. I have lived long enough...
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Moment of Clarity

 Some problems do not yield to force. You can push harder and only make them tighter. Others unlock the instant you stop trying to solve them the way you were taught and instead solve them the way the world actually works. Nineteen eighty nine. I was flying in from Tanzania to Cameroon, heading for Bamenda to meet my brother. He was flying in from Canada. We had not seen each other in a long time. The kind of reunion that lives in your chest before it ever happens. I landed in Douala and walked straight into trouble. The immigration gendarme took my passport and invited me into his office. The door closed. Papers were shuffled. Silence stretched. The unspoken expectation hung in the air like humidity. Chop moni. Everyone knew the ritual. You pay, you pass. You do not, you wait. I sat there thinking I might be stuck for hours. Or longer. I had no interest in playing the game, but the game had me. And then it happened. A moment of clarity. Sudden. Clean. Almost funny. I stoppe...
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The Father of the Bolshevik Revolution, Revised

 Moscow does not ease you into itself. It announces. Wide avenues. Heavy stone. A sense that the conservative way of life here still matters enough to die defending. We packed a lot into that visit. A bus tour looping around the city. Two riverboat cruises, one down the Moscow Canal and one along the Moscow River. The scenery was extraordinary in that severe, patient Russian way. And then there was the main event. Lenin. Four hundred rubles bought us a shortcut. Thirty of us paid an old woman who relieved us of both money and cameras with a practiced hand. As we waited our half hour, she filled the time with history. Red Square. The Kremlin. The weight of the place. I had little doubt that the guards would get their share. Normalna. This is how things work. We cut into line. Down we went, three stories underground, into a temperature controlled silence. The kind of cold that preserves more than flesh. At every corner stood young Kremlin police officers. Stone faced. Ceremonial....
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Risk and Reward - The Pain of Loss

 When I was six, maybe seven, I learned that risk does not always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it arrives as news. Quiet. Final. Irreversible. George Wall was our jungle pilot. He flew the Cessna 185 that carried us to school when roads dissolved into mud and rivers swallowed bridges. When the jungle closed in and land travel was impossible, George flew. Calm voice. Steady hands. The kind of man you trusted without needing to explain why. In my young mind, he was part of the landscape. As dependable as the airplane itself. Then one day he did not come back. The fog along the coast near Limbe had been thick. He turned steeply, trying to locate the runway. The rainforest does not forgive mistakes, and the trees there are older and taller than fear. The aircraft hit them. George was killed. I did not understand all the details. I understood the result. My father cried out when the news came. Not quietly. Not with restraint. He sobbed in a way that shook the room. It was one o...
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Memories of Holidays Past

 My favorite holiday has never been about the day itself. It has always been about a moment inside the day. A moment that slowed time enough for something deeper to settle. I must have been eight or nine. Christmas. My mother at the table. Spread out in front of us were several unassembled "Weihnachtspyramiden", German Christmas candle powered merry go rounds. They were not toys. They were intricate, deliberate constructions. Small engineering projects disguised as decoration. Precision cut wood. Tiny figures in Bavarian dress. Puzzles that demanded patience. My job was not glamorous. Glue. But my mother treated it like craft. She showed me how to apply it properly. Not too much so it would run. Not too little so the joint would fail. Enough to bond. Enough to last. There was care in that lesson. Care I did not yet know how to name. When they were assembled, they were beautiful. But when evening came and the candles were lit, that is when the magic arrived. We shut the lig...
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