pushing me into embarrassingly self-destructive habits. I found myself spending half of every day thinking about things from years ago and struggling to understand how it had all gone wrong. I flitted back and forth between attempted distraction and actually dealing with the pain. Sometimes I took it head on and let the agony come forth, hoping that by confronting these demons I would somehow slay them or at least learn how to live with them. But it only ever seemed to make things worse. Two weeks ago, I shut down my company, put all of my possessions into storage, and flew to Mozambique, on the eastern coast of southern Africa. It is a beautiful but utterly desolate place, trapped between a harsh land and a harsher sea. I had been there a few years earlier to run a half-marathon and it had brought me some measure of happiness. After the race, I got stuck in a remote tourist resort in the off-season, totally cut off from the outside world by sixteen miles of white-sand beach. I could buy simple foods from an old lady who lived nearby, but everything else was shut. In the depths of despair, it seemed like a good place to return to – simple, quiet, natural. Of course, it took only a few days for the novelty of the experience to wear off. It was just another distraction, after all. Travel had always occupied my mind and body to the extent that I could not fixate for long on loss and shame, but over the years its effectiveness had diminished. I had noticed on various hikes into the mountains or trips to the beach that beautiful scenery and exhilarating experiences not only failed to pluck me from my depression, but that this failure caused me to plummet to deeper depths. As I sat on the little porch outside my beach hut one sunny day, staring out at a scene that would once have filled me with wonder, but now brought only thoughts of suicide, I was interrupted by an elderly man in a tattered shirt and cargo shorts, wearing a ragged, widebrimmed hat. He sauntered up the beach from the south, having presumably walked the sixteen miles from the neighboring town. As he approached my porch, I saw that he was bearded and smiling broadly, and he clutched a
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