We got a lot going on in the world right now: There’s now a war in Iran, the funding bill for our DHS still hasn’t passed, and the entirety of the TSA has been working without a paycheck for the past month. With the war, I’d imagine both the region and Emirates have been scrambling their routes, reshuffling availability across their entire network.
And I guess at the last minute, it came as a shock (or no surprise) that a business class flight on Emirates from JFK to Milan Malpensa for 87,000 miles popped up on a Friday night. I’ll take it.
Getting through the airport was its own adventure. With TSA toiling without a paycheck, the lines at JFK were a testament to what underfunded infrastructure and petty politics looks like in real time. Regular TSA at Terminal 4: a 2-3 hour wait. Business and first class security: not much better at an hour. TSA PreCheck: also an hour. CLEAR alone: 30 minutes. CLEAR plus PreCheck: no line. I have never been more grateful for the credit cards covering what I had originally thought was an unnecessary service.
With the time I saved from arriving earlier than usual, I did something I’d never actually done before at JFK: paid a visit to the Emirates lounge in Terminal 4.
Not very flashy, but the food already puts it above the generic spread you find in most Terminal 1 lounges.
I grabbed an early dinner expecting to skip the onboard meal service — the goal was to prioritize sleep — and caught the latest episode of The Pitt.
With half an hour left before boarding at 9pm, I asked to take a quick shower at the lounge:
The boarding process for Emirates’ premium cabin has always entertained me with its small pleasures: a dedicated boarding gate, no shuffling behind 40 people with roller bags, and a minibar set up in my seat with snacks, 2 water bottles, and a bottle of fizzy water.
I found my seat, got settled, and promptly knocked out, skipping both meals.
I got in a solid 5-6 hours of sleep despite waking up once to use the bathroom and again to change into their famed bamboo pajamas — my second pair. The first came off an Emirates flight right after the White Coat Ceremony at Downstate back in September 2024, where I went straight from giving a speech in a white coat to an airport in my adventure outfit for my three flights to Bhutan. That PJ set has held up beautifully, and now I have a backup. This time, however, I left them the blanket. I don’t need two plane blankets.
Landing at Malpensa feeling more rested than usual, I sauntered past passport control, stamped into the EU, grabbed my checked bag with my ski boots, and looked at the departures board. My onward Vueling flight to Barcelona wasn’t until 3pm, so I went online and moved it up to 2:05pm, checked in, cleared security, and got into Barcelona by 4pm.
I then took an Uber to Barceló Sants, settled in, snuck in an evening workout, and slept early.
The next morning, after a record 11 hours of sleep, I headed to the beach at 10am to meet Madison, someone I’d been meaning to meet in person for over six years. We were connected through Mike Novak, with whom I did two Young Pioneer Tours trips (Afghanistan and Socotra!), and it took six years of Instagram DMs to finally lead to coffee on a beach in Barcelona, talking about her work in Ukraine during the war and her life here. We walked the full length of the pier and back, got lunch at a Lebanese place called Anís Café, and then she headed off. I went back to the hotel, did some work, worked out again, and we ended up coordinating to meet again a few hours later for dinner at MadMad Vegan.
The next morning I woke up for a quick workout, checked out, and headed back to the airport with my luggage and ski boots. For my third night in Barcelona I’d booked the Sleep&Fly in Terminal 1 to store my stuff, freshen up, head back into the city for dinner without dragging everything around with me. Finding the Sleep&Fly was a minor ordeal; their website directions are maddeningly vaguer than an escape room challenge, and I eventually gave up and pulled up a YouTube video. Once I found reception, checked in, freshened up, left my bags, and got back into the city for a long-awaited dinner at Disfrutar.
I’d booked this restaurant exactly one year ago on the day reservations opened. An alumnus of El Bulli, with its three Michelin Stars, Disfrutar has been perennially ranked the #1 restaurant in the world; it was on Pellegrino’s World’s Top 50 list so often it was eventually retired to a “Legends” category to make room for newer contenders. The reservation happened to land the night before Tomorrowland Winter began, which was either perfect planning or another on-brand monsoon-style happy accident… probably both, since I booked Tomorrowland long before I booked the flight, and the Disfrutar reservation predated either.
28 courses in 4 hours, beginning with…
Frozen passion fruit mojito ladyfinger
Beeroot rising from the Earth (no photo) paired with rose petals with gin and lychee raspberry
Black truffle vodka
Flourless ‘coca’ bread with truffle and burrata
Panchino filled with caviar and sour cream:
Bread with aerated smoked butter and caviar
Frozen gazpacho sandwich with fragrant sherry vinegar
The Gilda of Disfrutar
Crunchy mushroom leaf with porcini butter
Crispy egg yolk with warm mushrooms gelatin
Creamy mushrooms “escabeche” with oyster
Multi-spherical pesto with tender pistachios and eel
Our macaroni alla carbonara
Liquid salad: Tomato “polvorón” and arbequina Caviaroli
Hake “Suquet” with suquet “cappucino”
The hen that laid the golden eggs: crustacean fried egg
Foie gras and sweetcorn multi spherical tatin
Squab with kombu seaweed, amazake and almond
Instant smoked home-made cider & Walnut heart (cheese)
Reflection on the walnut
Hoisin cucumber
Black sesame cornet with yoghurt and wild strawberries
Black apple with noisette butter ice cream
Petit fours: Pineapple Rock. Strawberry mochi. Raspberry marshmallow. Matcha tea rock. Chocolate and passionfruit liquid bonbon. Violet cotton candy.
I couldn’t have asked for better company in Ramón and Gabriela, both locals who’ve already been to Disfrutar three times and still made this one work despite now having two kids. I last saw Gabriela ten months ago in July, just before the running of the bulls. Ramón I hadn’t seen in ten years, since 2016, and it was just like old times, as if we barely aged at all, whether ten months or ten years.
We know bamboo shoots take years to water before they bloom suddenly into a tall, robust plant, growing up to 80–90 feet in height in just weeks. It felt like that although the three of us had met in another lifetime as acquaintances, we’d soon realize that little did we know back then the whole point of it was to plant seeds for a bamboo shoot dinner like this to happen.
After goodbyes and more concrete plans made for the future than we ever had done in the past, I cabbed back to the Sleep&Fly and got a solid 7.5 hours before the next chapter.
Waking up at 8am with an hour before boarding, I took my large luggage up to the Terminal 1 departures area to check it in. Thanks to my grandfathered United Gold status, I dodged a particularly brutal line:
Then I walked back to my airport hotel room for their free breakfast and coffee. This whole airport hotel vibe feels like a liminal space.
With 20 minutes before boarding, I took advantage of the hotel’s conveniently inconvenient location in the Barcelona-Madrid shuttle corridor: you can access all the gates through here but through a completely empty security lane. Boarding pass in hand, I skipped through the crowds again and sailed straight through with a short walk to the main terminal, with even a few minutes left to leave the gate to refill my water bottle in the airport lounge. I’ll be using that hack again if flying out from BCN; I’d much rather walk than wait in line.
It was during here I suddenly felt compelled to write this:
These gates you walk past aren’t just destinations: they’re possibilities. The “what if I did this or that” floating abstractly in your head, where they’re so much easier to dismiss, have now become Barcelona, Porto, Ulaanbaatar, La Paz, Budapest, Phoenix, Ouagadougou, Varanasi, Shanghai, Queenstown, Warsaw: suitable titles for divergent and equally valid lives, manifested from thought into point-blank, figuratively literal gates staring at your face.
A life spent moving not just past but through those gates, and subsequently living countless lives, eventually leads me to my next destination, a long-held suspicion and its ultimate confirmation: that prioritizing flexibility over money, accountability over laissez-faire, freedom over stability, purpose over milestones, ikigai over early retirement — always choosing instead of settling — rewires your brain, and how you perceive and move through the world as a consequence. I welcomed life choosing my trips incrementally, gate after gate, until one day I looked back and genuinely could no longer feel the ceiling my head used to bump against. What I thought was “clarity” in my 20s was still just confined by the limits of what I’d been exposed to; not “wrong,” rather just right enough to bump that ceiling one inch further, until eventually I looked back and felt like I was dancing along Saturn’s rings with thousands of others who came along for the ride. Maybe this too will one day become a misinformed conclusion borne out of the naivety of my 30s, but at least we’re always moving in a direction of purpose and reemerging awakening, still living, still traveling, still sharing, still writing, still evolving.
Neuroplasticity isn’t the destination, though. It’s a condition certain lifestyles (or if you’d rather wait for them, tragic moments in life) will nurture, sustain, and then accelerate. The surreal part: the only organ capable of comprehending this change is the very organ that’s changing. You may not notice it until you’re already on the other side of it. There’s really no way for the brain to know if it’s really evolving or wasting away until it’s too late — so the least you can do is nurture the capability for self-awareness before it is. Iceberg, right ahead!
In the spirit of that last sentence, let alone the lifestyle of traveling around the globe, let’s go in circles for a minute about what conditions it takes to get here.
Access to this kind of sustainable, sober neuroplasticity can feel like it requires resources, like it’s a privilege. Everything does come easier when you’re more resourced. But the freedom I may be unsuccessfully alluding to here isn’t “freedom to live however you want,” it’s freedom as a mindset. And mindsets, while harder to access without material stability, aren’t exclusively its property. Money might make the path easier, but it can also become a distraction from realizing you didn’t need it to arrive at the same place. I’d argue in a separate piece how 5 minutes of daily meditation is probably both more affordable and more effective than booking a flight to get there. Besides, you can’t take any of it with you anyway.
The more honest caveat: meet basic needs first, find the mindset second. Maslow’s floor before his ceiling. Though even that gets complicated when you consider that most people alive today, including many we’d consider struggling, have access to plumbing and public WiFi that kings couldn’t have imagined for themselves a few generations ago. Maybe most of us are already ready, and it’s more accessible than we give ourselves credit for. Or, what I actually just ran for office fighting against, the basic conditions for this kind of autonomy are being deliberately and inappropriately engineered toward fewer and fewer people. Both things feel true depending on the day.
As much as I’m emotionally and politically invested in the latter, I lay out both because this is exactly the kind of argument where you can be talked into either corner depending on circumstances, where “it depends” isn’t a cop-out but the actual point. The complexity of a situation can compel anyone to feel they’re at the losing end no matter which way they play. But you can’t lose if you don’t play the game in the first place.
Which is all to say: we harnessed complexity to escape suffering. That’s the entire civilizational project: make life less brutal, less chaotic, less “what if this or that happened,” more survivable. But somewhere in the accumulation, the machinery we invented to avoid suffering became its own source of it. The complexity meant to protect us from life’s most basic fact started to be that fact. And eventually — through loss (boy do I know this one), through stillness (working on it), through travel (my preference; I’d rather move through gates than wait around for the next diagnosis or funeral to learn the same lesson) — an event or someone brings you back to the source code anyway. Strip the distractions and life resolves into one sentence: barren void and chaos. Entropy, uncertainty, suffering if you’re Buddhist or if you’ve decided chaos and suffering are the same thing. Call it what you want. Not a meme. Just the Truth (remember that?) the thing that was true before and after everything else you do about it.
But it doesn’t have to end there. “The traveler who’s been to every country in the world only to understand, finally, where home was all along” is a cliché that’s also not a cliché. That’s the actual structure of the realization: you need to draw a circle to find its center. No destination without a journey. No courage without fear. No center without a circumference. The journey was more than adjacent to the conclusion — it was the method. And once we’ve arrived at the barren chaos, once we’re standing on that blank canvas, we can begin to build anything we want from it. That’s where we build and find our gates.
As long as this world doesn’t burn down anytime soon, your gates are still there. Your resources begin from a mindset, and from there it’s just how you decide to practice it. Your purpose and possibilities are still staring back, from without and within. And whatever you’re feeling reading this is maybe a gate itself — I’ll selfishly call it Monsoonia, just for your sake.
Surrender to the nihilism, or stay in the stillness, or walk past another gate, or finally through one. Call it your practice — it’s still your call. The maddening part is you usually can’t see what your life and purpose really were until you’ve already walked through enough gates to understand what you’d been looking at all along.
Less than an hour transiting through Zurich, where I scarfed down a quick lunch at the SWISS Air Business Class Lounge:
I then landed at GVA at 2pm. Victor, Patricia, Cindy, and Donna had already driven over from Geneva to Huez that morning in their rental car; they’d arrived the day before. And after we confirmed they’d be driving a full car, full ski gear, and no more room, I’d arranged an Alps2Alps private transfer instead of trying to make the 1pm Tomorrowland shuttle, which I would have missed anyway.
I gotta say, the car size they sent for one person was a little overkill:
The transfer for me was 300 euros. This was probably the most expensive transfer I’ve ever paid for, and definitely the first time I’ve paid that for an international taxi. But after 15 years of doing this, back when I was a medical student hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and would’ve taken seven hours of trains and buses to get somewhere like this, I’m now at a point where 300 euros to not spend 7 hours on buses and trains I was going to miss anyway is an acceptable trade. I’ve adapted.
Once I arrived, the group had just finished their ski runs. I then checked into my overflow Airbnb at Les Bergers, which turned out to be directly across the street from the apartment Cindy had originally booked for the group. This happened because Donna joined much later, which meant instead of cramming 5 people into a one-bedroom with a sofa bed situation, we had a second unit right there for everyone in the group to spread out comfortably.
Once settling in thanks to a gracious Airbnb host named Pierre, Donna and I headed over to the Les Bergers’ main lodge to pick up my ski rentals at Intersport at Les Bergers.
Tomorrowland Winter, here we come!
- At time of posting in Barcelona, it was 14 °C - Humidity: 26% | Wind Speed: 11km/hr | Cloud Cover: pleasant
