Letters Along the Road

Four letters written from the road, to the voices that taught me how to live, question, and begin again.

To Montaigne,

I think you would understand this restlessness. You wrote to study yourself, to observe what it means to be human. I find myself doing the same, though I am less certain of what I am searching for. Perhaps it is not truth but tenderness, the willingness to sit with questions that never resolve. You said, “Que sais-je?” What do I know? Some days, not much at all. But in the act of asking, I feel alive.

Walking alone through Alsace, I often think of your tower and your essays written among books and silence. My silence is made of footsteps, of distant church bells, of the quiet between languages. You searched within to understand the world. I seem to search the world to understand myself. Perhaps it is the same thing.

To Camus,

I read you beneath a grey Alsatian sky, the vineyards stripped bare after harvest. You wrote that life is absurd, that we must imagine Sisyphus happy. I wonder if happiness is too big a word. Maybe it is enough simply to be awake. Some mornings I sit by the river and feel the absurdity you spoke of, this beautiful world that promises nothing. Yet I am still drawn to it, still wanting to praise it.

You found rebellion in living fully, even knowing that everything passes. I think of that often. I do not want to conquer meaning, only to honor the moment I am in. There is defiance in gentleness, in choosing to keep the heart open even when it hurts.

To Simone de Beauvoir,

You taught that freedom means nothing if it is not shared. I hold on to that. Guiding others through France, I watch them awaken to the world, to themselves, and I see how travel becomes a mirror for freedom. It reminds us that we belong not to one place but to one another.

You wrote with courage and clarity, but also with tenderness. I want to live that way. I want to be strong without closing, to love without losing myself. There is still so much I am unlearning.

To Simone Veil,

Yours is the voice that humbles me most. You carried dignity through horror and still chose life, compassion, and service. When I visited the memorials in Alsace, I thought of you. You never surrendered your faith in humanity, even when the world gave you every reason to.

I often wonder what courage really means. You showed that it can be quiet. It can mean simply continuing, holding onto decency when it would be easier to harden. I am still learning what that looks like in my own life.

And to all of you,

You have been companions on this long road. You remind me that meaning is not a destination but a practice, something shaped in how we live, love, and bear witness. I am still learning to be at peace with not knowing. Perhaps that is the truest beginning.

Travel keeps bringing me back to the same questions: how to live, how to love, how to remain soft in a world that is often unkind. These questions follow me from one place to another, yet they no longer demand answers. I have begun to see that meaning hides in the ordinary, in footsteps through damp leaves and the breath drawn before a new word in a foreign tongue. It is in the simple things, the weight of light on water, the scent of rain on old stone, that I remember why I chose to begin again.

Perhaps all I am meant to do is observe, the sky changing, the heart softening, the moment passing. The more I read you, the more I understand that the search for meaning is really the search for gentleness within ourselves, and that gentleness, once found, is what makes this life feel like home.