Connecting the dots

Years ago I met a woman who had traded everything ordinary for a van, her dogs, and a volcanic island.

Her name is Noemi Žonta.

She had represented Slovenia on stages most of us never stand on. Then her life broke — properly, the way lives sometimes do — and she did not put it back the way it had been. She left. She took the dogs, took the van, and started again on the black volcanic edge of Lanzarote, where the wind does not stop and nothing is convenient.

She describes it, without decoration, as a journey through loss, healing and freedom. I have never heard her make it sound braver than it was.

A hundred thousand people follow her now, and I promise you it is not for the sunsets. It is because she went first. Because somewhere in the middle of the worst of it she worked out that the life she was supposed to want was not the one she was going to have — and then, instead of grieving that quietly for thirty years, she drove out of it.

When we met, none of this had anything to do with me. I designed things. She lived in a van. It was a meeting — the kind you have hundreds of, and forget.

I did not forget it. I could not have told you why.

There is a line in a famous commencement speech about how you can never connect the dots looking forward — only looking backwards. At the time, a dot is nothing. A person you met. A conversation that ran one layer deeper than it needed to. Importance gets added later, by where your life ends up going.

So Ānanya arrived and showed me the edge of what I am. I can design the vehicle. I have not lived the thousand real mornings it exists for.

The answer already had a name, and had done for years.

Noemi is my cofounder now. Not an ambassador, not a face on a screen — the person who tells me, from a life I have not lived, when something I have drawn will not survive contact with a real February.

Last spring, before I understood where any of this was going, we made a short film about Ānanya and wrote every word of it ourselves.

In it we say Ānanya is for the ones who always felt there should be more — more beauty in an ordinary day, more freedom inside the luxury.

We wrote that about a stranger we had never met. It turned out we were describing the person sitting in the room.

Here is what took me years to see.

The thing that broke her life is the exact thing that qualifies her for this one. She did not leave in order to become anything. She left because she had to — and the years that followed taught her, in real weather, precisely what I needed to know and could never have learned at a drawing board.

She was not building towards Ānanya. I was not looking for her. Neither of us arranged a single part of it.

That is what the dots are. Not a plan you follow, but a line you are only allowed to see afterwards — and this one runs from the worst thing that ever happened to her, straight through a meeting neither of us thought twice about, to the vehicle I could not have built without her.