How Much Is a Day Worth?
I'm coming up on my final days in Copenhagen. 2023 flew right past me in a way that I never thought possible for how long the previous year’s felt. A small anecdote, I had a return flight to the US on Tuesday morning and of course, Wednesday ended up being the day that everyone was available for goodbyes. I looked to change my flight to one day later and I saw on screen that to change one day, it would cost 40.45 DKK or about 6 USD. No brainer. Well, if it looks too good to be true it might as well be because my card was immediately charged 4045DKK or 600 USD... I was able to get the situation resolved and have the price I saw (thank you screenshots!) honored but it got me thinking about how much I would pay to spend one extra day with all the incredible people I met.
If I had to distill the experience this past year has been for me, transformative would just be calling grass green. Yes, grass is green, but you could spend a lifetime understanding it and describing its makeup down to the cellular level. That's how I felt this year has been. It's been exciting, wonderful, euphoric, lonely, hopeless, depressing, peaceful and chaotic, mundane and novel, and a part of me has unlocked that I can't ever deny or ignore for the rest of my life.
On my last weekend in Copenhagen, I had such a me day. I went to Democratic Coffee; I went to go eat brunch with a friend and that turned into one of the most impactful conversations I've had in a while.
We talked about life, the future, the past, our hopes, our dreams, our regrets, and really asked what we thought our purpose in this world was. It was one of those conversations that you never wanted to end because the end meant that all these scary and vulnerable things that we just uttered into existence now live with us in a tangible way. Yet we could both feel the march of time make that decision for us, and in the end, we said goodbye with maybe tears in our eyes (definitely in mine), and a vision of a split world in where the potential futures in that conversation manifested themselves in the multiplicative nature of our choices.
Overwhelming to say the least was the feeling I had coming on Wednesday morning. I checked in my suitcase, and it weighed almost the same as when I arrived. How poetic that the numbers would have told you nothing changed yet the contents of the suitcase were so different.
I get to my gate, settling in with the same things I arrived with a year ago, looking out at this gray Danish sky, grabed a bølle and coffee from Lagkagehuset, and hear, "Welcome aboard for passengers on KLM Flight 1128, please gather your belongings and be prepared to board by your boarding group zone."
By the time they call my zone, the coffee is empty, and I throw out the cup, taking my last breath of Danish air as the only thing I'll carry with me on the plane, so glad I took that extra day, wishing I could take more.