(For those who have asked us over the years about the mystery of Saarbrücken, now you know.)

He then nodded, and instantly we started screaming and skipping around the apartment like we always did when something similar happened.

He truly wouldn’t miss this for the world. Not for private boats with DJs or wild excursions in Myanmar. I was his friend and he was going to show up. Period.

That what life ultimately comes down to, as Joseph Campbell said, is following your bliss, whatever that looks like.

Ammar was the only person in the world with the legal permit to climb the Great Pyramid of Giza. Or so he said to Thomas.

There was a relentless optimism within Thomas. If my instinct was to point out the dirt, the problem, the thing getting in the way, then his was to find the gold, the solution, the thing that would keep us going.

As I sat down next to him, he looked at me and said, “What about … Yes Theory?” I let it sink in. “I kinda like it.” “Because what we’re doing is a theory, right? We don’t have the answers, we’re just seeing whether saying ‘yes’ will lead to anything. So far it has, but we’re still testing. It’s like making our lives one big experiment, you know?”

If you want to be creative, the professor said, you have to put yourself in situations that you’re not used to. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Louvre. It can be anything or anywhere new—the point is novelty. Trying a new dish, watching a film in a foreign language, even taking a different route back home. Doing anything that pushes you outside of yo

I no longer belonged, and I badly wanted to. So I reluctantly left behind Matthieu, replacing him with Matt.