The restaurant was set into the hillside like a drawer left ajar, its windows facing the valley where the Mangde River cut through darkness. Across the gorge, Trongsa Dzong (the largest fortress in Bhutan, where daily the mundane shared space with the spiritual) hung illuminated against the black mass of the mountains, its white walls catching whatever light remained in the sky. By the time we sat down, the haze had thickened into something more deliberate. Mist was rolling up from the river in slow processions, erasing the middle distance, so that the Dzong seemed to float without foundation, a thing suspended between what was visible and what had to be taken on faith.
The cold came in stages. First through the gaps in conversation, then through the walls themselves, settling into the bones of the evening. Someone had ordered for the table: ema datshi (the chilli cheese that appears at every Bhutanese meal like a dare) and shakam datshi, strips of dried beef reconstituted in a sauce that tasted of altitude and patience. Red rice in a common bowl. The food was very good, and I ate without tasting it.
There were eight of us, I think, though memory has blurred the periphery. What remains sharp is the geometry of the table: old friends to my left, arranged in configurations I had known for years, their laughter arriving from a familiar country. And across from me, slightly diagonal, someone newer. Someone who had not known me long enough to know who I was supposed to be.
Through the days we travelled together, she wore a red sweater and moved with a kind of languid grace, as if time were not pressing against her. When she smiled, it was wide and unhesitant. I caught, whenever she leaned close to hear something over the noise, a trace of bergamot and lavender. These details have stayed when others have faded.
The lights from the Dzong reflected off the mist and made the darkness softer, more forgiving, the way certain silences can be. I remember wanting to say something (to her, specifically) and finding that the words I reached for belonged to a person I was no longer sure existed. The version of me that these old friends expected. Or the version I was trying, clumsily, to introduce. In the cold, in that haze, I could not locate the difference. I could not locate the original.
Yasujirō Ozu, the Japanese filmmaker whose work I return to often, had a technique he used between scenes: the pillow shot. A held image of something inanimate. A vase, a lantern, laundry on a line, a train disappearing into a long bridge. These shots do not advance the narrative. They suspend it. The critic Noël Burch described their effect as “the tension between the suspension of human presence and its potential return.” People are perhaps nearby, but for the moment they are not visible, and a rooftop or a streetlight is offered as centre of attention.
That dinner in Trongsa has become, in memory, a kind of pillow shot. The human drama (such as it was, which is to say quiet, internal, unresolved) has receded. What remains is the Dzong floating in mist. The geometry of figures at a table. The cold coming in stages. The feeling of watching myself from a little too far away, as if the camera had pulled back without my permission and refused to come closer.
Ozu’s pillow shots are often described as expressing mono no aware, a concept usually translated as “the sadness of things” or “the pathos of impermanence.” But the scholar Donald Richie offered a subtler reading: “putting up with things and taking satisfaction in your putting up with things.” A kind of acceptance, then. Or at least a stillness in the presence of what cannot be changed.
What I felt that night in Bhutan was not acceptance. It was exposure. The stillness of the scene only made clearer how much was moving underneath.
In her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes about what it takes to survive displacement (not the physical kind, though she begins there, but the psychological). The real difficulties, she argues, lie in subtler realms:
There, what’s called for is a kind of resilience of the psyche, a readiness to deal with what comes next. These captives lay out in a stark and dramatic way what goes on in every life: the transitions whereby you cease to be who you were. Seldom is it as dramatic, but nevertheless, something of this journey between the near and the far goes on in every life. Sometimes an old photograph, an old friend, an old letter will remind you that you are not who you once were, for the person who dwelt among them, valued this, chose that, wrote thus, no longer exists. Without noticing it you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment.
The outgrown garment. I have returned to this image many, many times since that trip to Bhutan, because it names something travel forced me to see but did not cause. The transformation had already happened. What travel did was remove the usual scaffolding (the daily routines, the familiar contexts, the social choreography) that had allowed me to keep wearing the garment anyway, to keep performing a self I had already, without noticing, outgrown.
Solnit goes on:
And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis.
I had not burned down the house. But I had, it seemed, walked out of it some time ago, and continued to show up at the address as if I still lived there.
Earlier that day, we had hiked through a landscape of pine and juniper, the trail fragrant with wildflowers and the particular cold that comes at altitude. Bhutan is seventy percent forest, and the trees seemed to know it: they stood with a kind of patient authority, unhurried, as if they had been there before the trails were cut and would remain long after the trails returned to soil. Every now and then, prayer flags strung between branches. A monastery visible on a distant ridge, white against green, the morning light catching its windows.
I remember thinking, watching a group of young monks in maroon robes walking in single file toward the monastery, that they belonged to a structure I could only observe from outside. Their days would begin at half past three with the ringing of bells, the cold air still dark blue. Hours hours of chanting before breakfast. Ten hours of study: Buddhist philosophy, sacred languages, the patient work of writing by hand. No phones. No distraction. A life organised around the slow dissolution of the very self that I, that evening at the restaurant, could not stop performing.
Bhutan is a country that has tried, through policy and philosophy, to resist the very transitions Solnit describes. Gross National Happiness is not merely a slogan; it is embedded in the constitution, in the deliberate limits on tourism, in the carbon-negative forests protected by law. A nation attempting to remain who it was. The architecture of the Dzong itself testified to this: walls three feet thick, built to the same specifications as the fortress raised in the seventeenth century, its proportions and materials unchanged across four hundred years. Even the trails we walked followed paths pilgrims had taken for centuries, the same stones worn smooth by the same kinds of feet.
I was having a crisis of self-coherence in a country organised around the preservation of coherence. The irony was not lost on me, though I could not have articulated it at the time.
What I could feel, sitting at that table with the mist rising and the Dzong floating and the old friends laughing at jokes whose rhythms I knew too well, was the mismatch. Not only between who I had been and who I was becoming (that would have been manageable, even clarifying) but between the multiple audiences witnessing me simultaneously. The old companions who expected one person. The new presence across the table who had met another. And my own uncertain gaze, trying to determine which performance was the performance and which, if any, was the thing itself.
I had not expected this to be the difficulty of travel. The guidebooks warn you about altitude sickness, about the roads that wind along cliff edges, about the uneven quality of the food and so on. They do not warn you that displacement makes visible what routine obscures: the degree to which selfhood is a collaborative fiction, maintained by the consistency of one’s audience.
At home, this is not a problem. Each context summons its appropriate self: the self who speaks to colleagues, the self who speaks to family, the self who appears in the company of old friends late at night when the wine has loosened something. These selves are not lies. But they are not the same, and ordinarily they do not meet. They are kept in separate rooms, called forth one at a time, and this sequencing is what we mean, most of the time, by coherence.
Travel collapses the rooms. It puts the audiences in the same frame. And when the selves they summon contradict each other, you discover that you have been relying on architecture you did not know was there.
One of the old friends, at some point that evening, asked me a question about work. I do not remember the question itself, but I remember the feeling of answering it: the way my voice shifted into a register I recognised as belonging to an earlier version of myself, confident, a little too quick to have opinions. She was watching from across the table. I could feel her attention. And I could feel, simultaneously, the falseness of the voice I was using and the impossibility of using any other. This was the self these friends knew. To speak in any other way would have been to confess that I had been performing all along, that the person they remembered was a costume I had worn for years and only now was finding too tight.
So I kept talking. And I watched myself keep talking. And the gap between the one who spoke and the one who watched grew wider with every sentence.
The conventional travel narrative promises transformation. You go somewhere unfamiliar, you encounter difficulty or beauty, you return changed. But that night suggested a different mechanism. Travel does not transform. It exposes. It strips away the social choreography that allows you to keep performing a self you have already abandoned. At home, context holds the performance in place. Abroad, the scaffolding falls.
And the loneliness I felt (the particular loneliness of being with people rather than apart from them) was the loneliness of being seen as who I was, not who I am. Of being summoned, by the presence of those who knew me longest, to answer for a person who no longer existed.
This is not what the brochures mean when they speak of solitude. We imagine that travel offers solitude as a gift: time away from the demands of others, space to hear one’s own thoughts. But the deeper solitude comes when you are surrounded by people who know you and you realise that the person they know is no longer there. You are alone in the company of their expectations. You are a stranger wearing a familiar face.
She did not know me long enough to summon the wrong self. That should have been freedom. In her presence, I could have been anyone, or at least I could have been whoever I was becoming rather than whoever I had been. But freedom, it turned out, raised its own problem: if I was not performing the old self, was I not simply performing a new one? And if I could not locate the non-performed self, the original beneath the garments, then what exactly was I offering her?
I remember trying, at some point that evening, to say something that mattered. Not a confession exactly, but something that might have opened a door: that I felt unmoored, that the trip had unsettled something, that I was not sure who I was in the presence of so many competing versions of myself. The words came out wrong. Too careful. Too constructed. I heard myself aestheticising the confusion instead of simply admitting to it, turning it into observation rather than offering it as vulnerability.
She received it with a soft look, patient, waiting. She was waiting for me to say the thing beneath the thing. And I could not find it. Or I could not say it. Or perhaps (this is what I have come to suspect) there was no thing beneath the thing, no solid ground beneath the performance, and what I was offering her was not a mask concealing a face but simply another mask, all the way down.
The mist thickened. The Dzong disappeared, then reappeared, then disappeared again. The old friends kept talking. I ate cheese and chilli, drank something warm, felt the cold settle into my hands. At some point the evening ended. I do not remember how.
I had known of anattā for years before that trip. No-self: the teaching that there is no fixed, unchanging essence beneath the flux of experience. I had read the suttas, sat with the logic, found it persuasive in the way philosophical arguments can be persuasive: at a distance, as structure, as something that reorganises thought without necessarily touching life. The Buddha’s teaching, as I understood it, was not that the self is an illusion to be seen through, but that clinging to a fixed self is the source of suffering. The self is not nothing; it is process. It is the river, not the water. And the mistake is to stand on the bank and insist that the river is the same river you saw yesterday, or that it should be.
I knew this. I had known it for a long time. And yet there I was, in a Buddhist country, surrounded by prayer wheels and fortress-monasteries and the quiet assumption that impermanence was simply the texture of things, and I was suffering precisely because I could not stop clinging to a fixed self. Not even to my own fixed self (I had already let that go, or thought I had) but to the fixed selves that others carried of me. I wanted the old friends to update their image. I wanted the new presence to see clearly. I wanted, somehow, for everyone’s river to synchronise, to arrive at the same water at the same time.
This is the gap the trip exposed: not between ignorance and knowledge, but between knowledge and its embodiment. I could explain anattā to anyone who asked. I could not stop suffering when the doctrine applied to me.
But here is where I must complicate my own argument.
The desire to have everyone’s river synchronise, to be seen as who I am rather than who I was: is this only suffering? Or is it also something else?
The Buddhist diagnosis would say: this is attachment. Let go of the need to be seen. Let the old friends carry their outdated image; it belongs to them, not to you. Let the new presence see whatever she sees; you cannot control her perception. Stop grasping at coherence and the suffering will ease.
And yet. The wish to be known (not observed, not assessed, but known) is not only attachment. It is also the ground of intimacy. It is what we offer when we offer ourselves to another person: the hope that they will see us as we are, even as we are changing, even as we are uncertain of our own outlines. To abandon that wish entirely would be to abandon something essential to connection. It would be a kind of solitude more radical than the loneliness I felt that night.
Perhaps this is what I was fumbling toward when I tried to speak to her: not a presentation of a coherent self, but an admission that coherence was exactly what I lacked, and that I was offering her the incoherence itself. The confusion. The shapeshifting. The not-knowing. Perhaps intimacy begins not when we show someone who we are, but when we show them that we do not know who we are, and trust them to stay anyway.
I could not say this at the time. I could not even think it clearly. But something in her patience suggested she might have understood it better than I did.
Solnit writes that “some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch.” But I wonder now if building is the right metaphor. What if there is no ground? What if the task is not construction but navigation: learning to move through the flux without pretending it is solid, without insisting that the river is a bridge?
And what if navigation requires company? What if the self is not a thing we construct in solitude but a process that happens between people, in the friction of being seen and misrecognised, in the slow work of updating each other’s images, in the patience of staying present while someone figures out who they are becoming?
Travel, for me, has become less about transformation and more about this: the willingness to be caught between selves, to let the mismatch become visible, to sit with the discomfort of being seen by people who knew you when you were someone else. The gift is not that you become a new person. The gift is that you stop pretending you were ever one person to begin with.
But there is another gift, harder to accept: the people who stay. The old friends who laugh at jokes whose rhythms they know too well, and who will, eventually, learn the rhythms of whoever you are becoming. The new presence who watches with patience while you fumble toward a sentence that never arrives. The company of those who do not require you to be coherent, who are willing to sit with you in the mist while the Dzong appears and disappears and appears again.
The Dzong is still there, floating above the Mangde River on nights when the mist rolls in. The old friends have continued their lives, carrying their images of me, images I have stopped trying to correct. She and I did not become what I half-hoped we might; whatever I was fumbling toward that evening, the words never found their shape, and by the time I might have found them, the moment had passed and other moments had taken its place. And I (whoever that is) am still here, still wearing garments, still occasionally noticing that they no longer fit.
Some mornings I think of those monks beginning their day at half past three, the bells ringing in the dark, the cold air carrying the sound of chanting across the valley. Their practice is not to become a fixed self but to dissolve the fixation, over and over, day after day, until the dissolution becomes as natural as breathing. I am not a monk, though I have tried. I do not have the discipline, or perhaps the faith. But I think I understand what they are practice toward: not the absence of self, but the absence of grip. The willingness to let the river be a river.
Ozu’s films end, often, with a pillow shot held just a beat too long. A vase in an empty room. Waves breaking on a darkened shore. The human drama has concluded, but the camera lingers, as if to say: the world continues without you. The story ends, but the stillness does not.
I think of that dinner now the same way. The mist rising. The fortress floating. The geometry of figures at a table, caught in a frame they did not choose. And beneath the stillness, barely visible, the slow work of change: rivers running in the dark, carrying water that will never be the same water twice, toward a sea that does not ask them to be otherwise.