For the summer of 1982, my intention had been to first visit Greece, then spend time in Turkey, but things turned out otherwise. After a short stay in Athens, I headed up to Thessaloniki. While I was waiting for my visa to Mount Athos, I spent my time around the cafés in the centre of the town, playing tavli (the Greek version of backgammon) with old men. This earned me some money and helped me improve my Greek (I had bought a Greek-English dictionary and a phrasebook, and was able to articulate very simple sentences, enough to make the old men laugh).  

Mount Athos is an autonomous region within Greece, a peninsula that includes about 20 Greek orthodox monasteries. It’s a place where only males are allowed access and a visa is required. You had to pay an entry fee and could then wander from one monastery to the next, where you were also lodged in communal rooms. I spent a week on Mount Athos. It was my first encounter with monastic life, and it left a strong impression on me.

In my family, anything related to religion or spirituality had been frowned upon, especially by Paul. But here, on Mount Athos, I could see how the daily rituals, including chanting, reading and quiet conversation, brought peace to the monks. You could see in their luminous faces that they were happy. Most monks spoke only Greek, but those that understood some English, transmitted to me the joy that a simple life, devoid of any material considerations, had on them. Many years later, I would again interact with monks in Ladakh, India. They were Buddhists, but their message was the same: a life without material aspirations brings you joy. It was not a lesson I would forget.

From Mount Athos I went back to Athens and decided to take a boat to whichever island a boat happened to leave for. My intention was to spend two or three days on the Cyclades and then leave for Istanbul. Accordingly, I left my backpack in consignment in the port of Piraeus and boarded the ship with only my sleeping bag and a few minimal belongings.

The boat I took headed for Ios, a large island in the middle of the Cyclades. At the time, it had only one road and one vehicle, a little bus that took people from the port to Mylopotas beach. Along the way, the bus made a stop in the village of Ios, a town consisting of twenty houses on the top of a hill. Four or five people got off the boat with me, all of them Greeks, who left the bus in Ios Village. I was the only one left when the bus ground to a halt at the entrance to the beach.

Mylopotas is a stretch of sand about 800 m long. At the entrance to the beach, on each side of the bus stop, there was a small taverna. At a distance, close to a few rock formations, you could see a few tents. After getting off the bus, I noticed that the driver parked the bus under a few shrubs. I asked him at what time he would drive back to the port. ‘I’ll only drive the bus back next week,’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’ I enquired. ‘The bus only operates when a boat arrives, and that’s once a week,’ he said. ‘But I have been told that there is a boat every day to Ios,’ I said. ‘Well I don’t know who told you that, but at this time of the year, we have one boat a week. In the winter months, it’s only one boat every ten days,’ he added, and left for one of the two tavernas.

So here I was, stuck on Ios, with one bathing suit, one t-shirt, my toothbrush and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (luckily, a long book), and my sleeping bag. The first day, I wandered up and down the beach and tried to make conversation with the sole visitor to one of the tavernas. Hardly anyone showed up in the following days (the people in the tents bought supplies from the village and mostly stayed away from the beach).

On Day 3, I decided that it didn’t make sense to wear any clothes. It was hot, I was sweating, there was no place to wash anything, and anyway, I had no soap with me. On Day 4, I discovered an abandoned shower at the other end of the beach, out of which came a tiny trickle of water. This was enough to get the salt from the sea off me once every other day.

On Day 5 a routine started. I would get up in the morning as soon as there was light (about 5am) and wander down to the beach (I was sleeping under a few shrubs, about 100 m away from the sea). After going for a swim, I would sit on the sand and look at the horizon. At about noon, I would get up, go to where my sleeping bag was, put on my bathing suit and my t-shirt and head for one of the two tavernas. For the most part, I was the only guest and I would eat whatever was served, which was: moussaka, dolmades, taramasalata or tzatziki. Every now and again, if one of the taverna owners had been out fishing, he would come back with small mullet or an octopus, and I would have that. After lunch, I would head back to where my sleeping bag was, take off my clothes, head back to the beach and sit on the sand again, mostly in exactly the same spot. Occasionally, I would walk to the end of the beach and back, but mostly I just sat there and looked out at the sea. 

In the late afternoon, I would get up, take another swim, stand for a few minutes under the trickle of water at the other end of the beach, then go to my sleeping bag, put on my bathing suit and t-shirt and have my second meal of the day at one of the two tavernas.

When Day 7 arrived, the bus driver showed up at lunchtime at the taverna. He waved at me and said: ‘I leave in a few minutes for the port, the boat arrives in about an hour.’ But I said, ‘Thank you, I’ll be staying a bit longer.’ 

I stayed for another four weeks on Ios and only left at the end of Week 5 because I had promised to meet Judith and Stan on Crete, and had no way of letting them know that I would have rather stayed for an additional week on Ios, before heading to Paris.

It was only much later, once I started to practice meditation, that I understood what had happened on Ios. The lack of contact with people, the impossibility of having any distractions, the forced reduction of my days to the bare essentials of living, induced in me a deep sense of peace that over time led to immense well-being. By doing absolutely nothing (I barely finished my book, and even that took nearly five weeks), I achieved a calm and a clarity of mind that I had never experienced before. Every night I slept peacefully, and it became apparent after a few days that I would require nothing more to enjoy what turned out to be some of the most memorable days of my life.

The Ios experience taught me a lesson that I would never forget: it’s through inner peace that happiness arrives, not through outside stimuli.

I dragged myself away from Ios and, after spending a few days on Crete with my friends, took a bus from Athens to Paris, where I arrived in late July. When I arrived, my Bigelow Club roommate Christen, who I had arranged to meet there, at first didn’t recognise me. My hair had grown, it had become completely blond from the many weeks sitting in the sun, and my skin was completely dark. I also radiated an inner calm that stood in some contrast to the wild party environment of our last weeks together in Boston.

At first, I adapted slowly to my return to civilisation, but after a while I was again going out and visiting the many wonders of Paris. One of them was Elisabeth, a beautiful Parisian, who I had met in Boston the year before. She was studying architecture at MIT and I was strongly attracted to her. In Paris, we had a short, but very intense romance, and it was only with great trouble that Christen convinced me to join him and his girlfriend Stine Willoch on a tour of the south of France.

Christen and I had become very close during our year at the Bigelow Club, and whenever I wasn’t with Elisabeth, I spent my time with him in Paris. On one occasion, he asked me whether I’d like to come to lunch with Stine’s family, who happened to be in Paris too. ‘Sure,’ I said. When I arrived at the address Christen had given me, I realised the mistake I had made—the lunch was at one of Paris’s three-star restaurants, and I was dressed like a tramp in shorts, sandals, a completely discoloured T-shirt and wearing a bright blue bandana to contain my hair, which I hadn’t cut in more than three months and was now a mixture of blond and brown. But it was too late to turn back; the table was by the window, Christen and Stine had spotted me, and were waving at me. So, in I went. Totally embarrassed, I shook hands with the elegantly dressed parents of Stine and took a seat as far away as possible from them. My unease grew even worse when, throughout the lunch, people kept coming in from the street to exchange a few words with Stine’s father and ask for an autograph. It’s only then that I realised that I was having lunch with Kåre Willoch, the Prime Minister of Norway. I guess the Norwegian tourists who had discovered that their PM was sitting in a restaurant in Paris and came in to say hello, must have thought that he was quite socially minded, and a nice guy, to have invited a vagrant to such an elegant place.