This week from Africa 8.4.26

This week we’ve been anchored in Dakar.

A lot of it was practical.

Checking into Senegal. Getting the cruising permit. Looking for a replacement for our stolen outboard engine. And after quite a bit of searching, we finally found one we are genuinely happy with. That felt like a real relief.

And then we went to Gorée Island.

What caught me off guard first was how beautiful it is.
Really beautiful.
Small streets. Trees and plants everywhere. Art. Color. No cars.
There is something calm about the island. Something soft.

And then there is the history.

And that was hard to hold together.
I walked through those beautiful streets thinking about what this place once was part of. What happened there. What human beings did to other human beings there.

And I kept coming back to one thought:

How much of life depends on things you never chose.
Where you are born.
With which skin color.
Into what kind of world.

I felt ashamed of our past as Europeans.
Not as an intellectual thought.
Just deeply ashamed.
Ashamed that this happened.
Ashamed that people built systems like this and treated them as normal.

And I also felt humbled.

Because a place like that changes the way you look at your own life. Even the things I usually call my achievements felt different there. No matter how hard I may have worked, I still did so on a foundation of freedom that others were never given.

And that matters.
A lot.

More than anything, I felt grateful.
Grateful for my freedom.
For movement.
For choice.
For the simple fact that I can leave one place and go to another because I decide to.

This week, that did not feel normal to me.
It felt like a gift.
I did not leave the island with a lesson.
Just quieter than before.

Maybe that is enough.

Maybe not everything has to become useful immediately.
Maybe sometimes it is enough to let a place touch you.
To let beauty and pain exist in the same place.
And to notice that something in you has shifted.

I think this is true in coaching too.

Real change does not always begin with a better answer.
Sometimes it begins when something interrupts the reality we have been living in
and we are willing to let that interruption in.