The Limits of Paradise
I arrived in Costa Rica with a broken toe and an inflated sense of invincibility.
The toe happened on my second day in the country. I was at a waterfall near Montezuma, on the Pacific coast, and the jungle around it looked like something out of a comic book. Too green, too perfect, too much like the Tarzan fantasies I'd had as a kid watching Saturday morning cartoons in Athens.
There were vines. Thick, ropy vines hanging from trees that arched over a twenty-meter waterfall that poured into a crystal-clear pool.
And I thought: I could climb that.
You have to understand the headspace I was in. I'd spent the past few months discovering that the universe responds to intention, that flow is real, that synchronicity operates according to laws we don't fully understand but can definitely learn to surf.
In Mexico, I'd had my mind blown open by conversations about zero and one, about the digital threshold humanity was crossing.
In Guatemala, I'd learned about the wave—that there's a spot on it for everyone if you can find your angle.
In San Cristobal, I'd watched Marco burn his face off and learned that observation interrupts flow, that you can't document and experience simultaneously.
So by the time I got to Costa Rica, I was riding high. Feeling like I'd cracked the code. Like the universe was my playground and all I had to do was say yes to whatever presented itself.
The vines said: Climb me.
I said: Okay.
Halfway up, about twelve meters off the ground, dangling over rocks and churning water, I realized I'd made a mistake.
The vine was slippery. My hands were sweating. And there was a very real possibility I was about to die doing something incredibly stupid that I'd chosen to do for no reason other than it looked cool.
I made it to the top through sheer terror-driven adrenaline. Pulled myself over the edge of the waterfall, lay on the rocks gasping, and thought: What the fuck am I doing?
But here's the thing about momentum: Once you're at the top of a twenty-meter waterfall, the only way down is through.
I jumped.
The water hit me like a concrete wall. I went deep, deeper than I expected, my body tumbling in the white chaos of the waterfall's churn. When I finally surfaced, gasping and disoriented, my friends on the shore were cheering.
It wasn't until I tried to swim to the edge that I felt it—the sharp, wrong-angle pain in my right foot.
I'd broken my baby toe.
For a backpacker in the hiking paradise of Central America, a broken toe is basically the worst injury you can have that won't kill you. You can't walk properly. You can't wear shoes. You can't do anything except limp around like an idiot and explain to everyone who asks that yes, you did this to yourself, climbing a vine, because you thought it would be fun.
The universe, it seemed, had a sense of humor.
I spent the next week at a spa in the mountains near Arenal volcano, soaking in hot springs and watching the mountain fume and gurgle lava at night. My inflated sense of invincibility deflated considerably.
The lesson was clear: Flow doesn't mean invincible. Synchronicity doesn't mean safe. The universe might respond to intention, but it also has a way of correcting you when you get arrogant.
I'd gotten arrogant.
The broken toe was a reminder.
By the time my toe had healed enough to walk on it, I'd made my way to Puerto Viejo, on the Caribbean side of Costa Rica. The vibe there was completely different from the Pacific coast—blacks and rastas, reggae instead of salsa, laid-back instead of party-hard.
It was a surfer's paradise. Endless summer energy. Retired pro surfers running hostels. Beach cruising on bicycles. Steady breaks that taught you patience instead of punishing your mistakes.
I spent two weeks there, surfing every morning, reading in hammocks every afternoon, and slowly remembering how to not try so hard.
Costa Rica was teaching me something important: Sometimes paradise is exactly what it looks like. Not everything has to be a test or a lesson or an initiation. Sometimes a beautiful beach is just a beautiful beach, and the only thing you need to do is enjoy it.
But of course, I couldn't leave it at that.
I heard about a trance party happening in the mountains near Alajuela, up in the central highlands. It was supposed to be the real deal—not a tourist thing, but an actual underground party organized by locals who'd caught the Goa virus and brought it home.
Getting there required an eight-hour bus ride on roads so bumpy I thought my teeth were going to fall out. The bus driver seemed to have a relative in every village we passed through, and we stopped approximately ten thousand times while he got out to say hello to someone's cousin's aunt.
I was ready to give up on the whole thing when I noticed the kid sitting across from me.
He was maybe twenty-two, twenty-three. Dark hair, dark eyes, darker energy. He'd been staring at me since I got on the bus, but in a way that felt less creepy and more... haunted.
When I finally asked him where I should get off for Alajuela, he said: "Follow me. I'm going your way."
His name was Michael.
And he was, as we say in Greece, "crazy with papers."
We talked for the remaining hours of the bus ride, and within the first twenty minutes I knew more about this kid than I knew about people I'd been friends with for years.
He was manic-depressive. He'd tried to kill himself multiple times, and the last two attempts had nearly succeeded. His hands were covered in deep scars and burns—marks from when he'd tried to end it. Bad quality tattoos covered his shoulders and forearms, the kind you get from friends with homemade equipment, not professionals.
He'd been living in the mountains for the past year, painting. Before that, he'd been in a psychiatric hospital. Before that, he'd been smoking crack.
Now he took antidepressants and smoked weed and painted in a little house he'd built on a hill outside the city.
He reminded me so much of my friend Christos back in Athens—another brilliant, tortured artist who danced too close to the edge—that I couldn't help but be drawn to him.
We talked about depression. About life and death. About art as the thing that keeps you alive when everything else wants you dead. About suicide not as weakness but as a constant option you have to choose against, every single day.
In broken English and Spanish, we built a bridge between us.
The party, it turned out, was forty-five minutes outside Alajuela, up near another volcano. Michael's house was halfway there. He offered to guide me to his village, and from there I could take a cab to the party.
"I'm going home to visit my parents," he said. "I haven't seen them in almost a year."
When we got to his house and he knocked on the door, his mother opened it with a look of shock that quickly turned to joy. She glanced at me—the gringo standing behind her prodigal son—and after a moment's hesitation, invited me in too.
Inside were Michael's wife and his three-year-old kid.
He hadn't mentioned them on the bus.
He hadn't seen them in months.
We sat in the small living room while his mother made coffee and his wife held their child and looked at Michael like she was trying to remember who he was.
There was so much unspoken pain in that room. So much history. So much brokenness that no amount of antidepressants or mountain solitude could fix.
And then Michael left the room and came back with fifty paintings.
Rolled canvases. He laid them on the floor and gestured for me to look.
I crouched down and started going through them slowly.
They were extraordinary.
Dark, surreal, honest in a way that made my chest tight. Every canvas was filled with his pain and the pain of his culture—globalization, imperialism, cultural deterioration. He painted with coffee rinds mixed into his paint, giving everything this brown, earthy quality that felt ancient and urgent at the same time.
Historical grievances. Slavery. Urbanization. Dependency. The ways Costa Rica had been colonized, exploited, homogenized.
This was a true avant-garde artist, living in the mountains of Costa Rica, pouring his soul onto canvas because it was the only alternative to pouring his blood onto the floor.
I looked up at him.
"These are incredible," I said.
He just nodded. Like he already knew. Like the problem wasn't talent—it was everything else.
"Come to the party with me," I said.
He hesitated. Looked at his wife, his kid, his mother.
Then he said: "Okay."
We arrived at the party an hour later. It was in a small village I'd never heard of, in a field near the volcano, and I genuinely could not believe I'd stumbled onto a real trance party in rural Costa Rica.
The whole story felt too synchronistic. Too perfectly aligned. Meeting Michael on the bus, discovering his art, bringing him to this party—it was like the universe was writing the script and I was just following along.
The music was dark. Darker than Goa, darker than anything I'd heard in Mexico. The crowd was young—seventeen, eighteen-year-olds with lollipops and wide eyes, the kind of kids who'd discovered trance and thought they'd discovered God.
I wandered around for a while, looking for the promoters to see if I could get permission to film. When I came back to where I'd left Michael, I found him standing with another guy.
"This is my brother," Michael said.
The guy looked at me, looked at Michael, and I could see the shock in both their faces.
"We haven't seen each other in two years," Michael said quietly.
Okay.
At this point, the synchronicity was getting too weird even for me.
I meet a random kid on a bus. He takes me to his house where I discover he's a genius artist. I bring him to a party in the middle of nowhere. And his brother—who he hasn't seen in two years—just happens to be at the same party.
What were the odds?
What did it mean?
Was the universe showing off? Was this a sign? Was I supposed to do something with this information?
I didn't know. But I felt it—that electric sense that reality was thinner here, that the boundary between coincidence and meaning had collapsed, and I was standing in the gap.
The party was going well. I'd found the promoters. I'd gotten permission to film. The music was building. The crowd was peaking.
And then:
BAM BAM BAM.
Gunshots.
Three meters away from me.
Screams.
A lot of them.
Blood.
A lot of that too.
A guy on the floor, bleeding like the animals I'd seen slaughtered in markets across Central America. The music stopped. People ran. The boundary between festival and nightmare dissolved in an instant.
I didn't think. I just moved.
Someone grabbed me and pulled me toward a truck. I climbed into the back. The truck took off, bouncing down dirt roads in the dark, and within minutes we were at the bus station in Alajuela.
The same bus station I'd arrived at twelve hours earlier.
The same bus driver who'd stopped ten thousand times to say hello to relatives was there, freshly woken, looking at my drained body with what might have been curiosity or might have been pity.
I got on the bus.
I finally got some sleep.
The eight-hour drive I'd done the day before, I did again. In a glazed limbo of exhaustion and shock. Every bump in the road was a jolt to my unwinding mind. The engine roared up steep mountains. My broken toe throbbed.
When the door opened in Montezuma, I walked to the same café where I'd left my friend Peter twenty-four hours earlier.
He was sitting there, eating rice and beans.
I sat down and joined him.
Sitting here in New York, dictating this to Akiko, I'm trying to make sense of what Costa Rica was teaching me.
On the surface, it's obvious: Flow has limits. Synchronicity doesn't mean safe. The universe might line up impossible coincidences, but that doesn't mean everything ends well.
Michael meeting his brother at a random party in the mountains—that was magic.
A guy getting shot three meters away from me—that was chaos.
Both happened in the same night. Both were real.
But there's something deeper.
I think Costa Rica was showing me that paradise and violence exist on the same continuum. That beauty and danger are neighbors. That the same culture that produces genius artists also produces the conditions that drive them to suicide.
That the same scene that creates transcendent music also attracts the kind of violence that ends parties with gunfire.
The broken toe was a metaphor I didn't understand at first:
I climbed the vine because I thought I was invincible. I jumped because I thought the universe would catch me. I broke my toe because the universe was reminding me: You're still human. Gravity still applies.
The gunshots at the party were the same lesson, amplified:
Synchronicity is real. Flow is real. Magic is real.
But so is blood.
I've thought about Michael a lot over the years. Wondered if he's still alive. Wondered if his paintings ever made it out of that small house in the mountains. Wondered if seeing his brother that night changed anything for him, or if it was just another strange moment in a life full of them.
I never saw him again after that night.
But I carry his paintings in my memory. The coffee-ringed canvases. The dark, honest depictions of a culture being crushed by forces it couldn't resist.
He was trying to make sense of the chaos by painting it.
I was trying to make sense of the chaos by traveling through it.
Maybe we were doing the same thing, just with different tools.
Costa Rica taught me that you can't cherry-pick reality.
You can't say: I want the synchronicity and the magic and the impossible coincidences, but not the violence and the danger and the broken toes.
It's a package deal.
The universe doesn't give you flow without friction. It doesn't give you transcendence without risk. It doesn't give you paradise without reminding you that paradise is temporary, conditional, and always one gunshot away from ending.
This was a different lesson than Ecuador.
In Ecuador, I'd learned that flow without wisdom is reckless—that not everything is a sign, that you have to use discernment even when you're surrendering.
In Costa Rica, I learned that even when you're wise, even when you're discerning, even when you're doing everything right—shit still happens.
The universe is not a vending machine where you put in spiritual practice and get out safety.
Sometimes you meet a genius on a bus and witness impossible synchronicity and still end up running from gunfire.
That's not a failure of flow.
That's just... life.
The moist beauty of Costa Rica had reminded me of a sixteen-year-old girl—ripe, full of lust, swollen with color and possibility.
But sixteen-year-olds are also reckless, unpredictable, and dangerous.
You can fall in love with them, but you can't control them.
You can surf their energy, but you can't tame it.
All you can do is enjoy the ride while it lasts and get out before it turns violent.
I left Costa Rica with a limp, a story I could barely believe, and a deeper understanding of what I was actually doing on this journey.
I wasn't trying to escape reality.
I was trying to encounter it more directly.
Stripped of the insulation that Western life provides—the insurance, the institutions, the illusion of safety—I was learning what reality actually feels like.
Beautiful and terrifying. Synchronistic and chaotic. Magical and violent.
All at once. All the time.
The wave I was surfing wasn't smooth.
It was full of broken glass and broken toes and broken people making beautiful art because beauty was the only weapon they had against the darkness.
And I was starting to understand:
That's not the exception.
That's the wave.