This is the destination
A New Year’s tale about a man with very little, and what he taught me about having enough
Chapter 45
The streets wake before I do.
By the time I round the corner each morning, the bakery has already exhaled its first breath of bread into the cold air. The pigeons have claimed their territories on the bridge’s iron railings. And that that particular, beautiful slant of winter light has begun its slow crawl across the cobblestones.
There is one street I know by heart.
Not because I’ve memorized it, but because I’ve lived it, step by step, season by season, year folding into year. It’s the way of my daily walk.
The same bench holds the weight of the same waiting. And Pascal is there.
As permanent as the bridge itself. As inevitable as morning.
A sleeping bag the color of old smoke. Cardboard arranged with the careful geometry of someone who has learned to make a home from refuse. And beside him, always, his dog. I’ve never learned the dog’s name. It doesn’t seem to matter. The dog exists beyond naming, beyond the human need to categorize and claim. It simply is, the way Pascal simply is, a fact of this street, this city, this life.
People flow past like water around a stone. They don’t see him. Or they see him and look away, which is worse. They see the sleeping bag, the cup, the cardboard sign that doesn’t beg so much as state: Anything helps. God bless.
But I see Pascal now.
It took years, I'll admit. Years of walking past. Years of the casual blindness we all perfect, that evolutionary trait that lets us survive cities without breaking under the weight of all that need. But one morning, I can't remember which, can't remember why, I stopped. And he looked up. And I said, "Hi" And he said it back. And that’s how it began.
We’ve built a language over time, Pascal and I. Not grand. Not profound. Just human.
“Cold today.”
“Yes. Very cold.”
“Your dog? He’s well?”
“Always well. Better than me.”
Sometimes I bring coffee. Sometimes he’s already gone, moved somewhere else by police or weather or the invisible pressures that govern lives like his. Sometimes we talk about nothing. Sometimes we talk about everything in the guise of nothing.
This time, it was different.
The year was ending. The light was thin and gold. The bridge was almost empty. And when I stopped, when I handed him the coffee, he asked me a question:
“How was your year?”
Not How are you? That automatic, meaningless question we fire at each other like greetings exchanged in a language neither speaker understands.
He asked about my year. He asked with his eyes. He asked like he had time. Like my answer mattered. Like we were two people on a bridge at the end of something, and honesty was the only currency that held value.
I could have deflected. Could have smiled and said “Good, good” and kept walking into my day, my plans, my forward momentum.
Instead, I told the truth.
“Hard,” I said, before I could edit myself.
“Really hard.”
The words hung there between us. And immediately, I felt it, that hot rush of shame. The absurdity of what I’d just done. Telling a man who sleeps on cardboard that my year was hard.
I felt exposed. Ridiculous. Like I’d committed some unspoken violation of the social contract that says: you don’t complain about your problems to people whose problems dwarf yours. You don’t bring your small suffering to someone living in the cathedral of suffering itself.
But Pascal didn’t flinch. Didn’t look at me with judgment or irony or that particular kind of pity that says you don’t know what hard is. He just waited. Present. Patient. Like he’d given me permission I didn’t know I needed.
So I kept going.
“But it was beautiful. Real.”
He was quiet for a moment. His dog shifted, rearranged itself against his leg. A pigeon landed nearby, considered us, flew away.
Then Pascal smiled. “That’s the good kind,” he said.
And just like that, the shame dissolved. Because he understood what I'd been trying to say. That hardness isn't measured in absolutes. That suffering isn't a competition. That the year that cracks you open and lets the light in, that's the good kind, regardless of where you sleep or what you own or how the world measures your worth.
I’ve replayed that moment a hundred times since. Turned it over like a coin in my pocket. That’s the good kind. Four words. But they carried the weight of someone who has lived enough to know: the years that break us open are often the years that make us real.
As I walked away, I felt it, that shock of recognition you get when you realize you’ve been learning something without knowing it.
The most important conversations I had this year didn’t happen in conference rooms or cafes designed for conversation. They didn’t come with agendas or outcomes. They happened in margins. In gaps. With people the world has trained me not to see.
Pascal has no LinkedIn. No portfolio. No personal brand. He has a dog, a corner, and the kind of presence that comes from having nothing left to perform. And most importantly, nothing to lose. No ladder to climb. No image to maintain. Just the raw, undefended fact of being human on a street where humans pass.
And in his company, I feel more seen than in rooms full of people trying to see me.
We worship movement. We build religions around it. Growth. Progress. Optimization. Becoming. We ask each other constantly: Where are you going? What’s next? What are you building?
As if standing still were failure. As if presence without purpose were a kind of death.
But what if we have it backwards?
What if the work beneath the work is not about getting somewhere but about being here? Now. Today. What if presence is the thing we’ve been too busy becoming to practice?
Pascal doesn’t hustle. Doesn’t scale. Doesn’t disrupt. He sits. He waits. He greets the same street every morning with the same patience. And somehow, in that repetition, in that refusal to become anything other than what he is, he’s teaching me something I forgot I needed to learn.
Presence is not a technique. It’s not something you optimize or schedule into your calendar between meetings. It’s what’s left when ambition goes quiet. When the performance ends. When you stop trying to get somewhere and simply are where you are.
If 2025 taught me anything, it’s that connection doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t arrive in breakthroughs or milestones. It waits. Quietly. On bridges. In doorways. In the repetition we dismiss as mundane.
The same street. The same face. The same “bonjour.”
But nothing is the same. Because we’re not the same. Each encounter is an invitation to meet the world, and each other, again. Without needing the story to progress. Without needing it to mean something. Without needing it to be anything other than what it is: two people, a bridge, a moment of mutual recognition.
This is the work we avoid because it doesn’t photograph well. It doesn’t make us impressive or productive or optimized.
But it makes us available. And availability, I’m learning, is the rarest form of generosity.
So here we are. In 2026. Another year unfolding like a scroll we haven’t written yet.
I don’t know what this year will bring. Don’t know what I’ll build or become or accomplish. But I know this: I want to walk my streets with less hurry and more heart. I want to meet the Pascals of the world as people, complete, complex, worthy of my attention not because of what they can give me, but because they are.
I want to remember that the bridge between us is not built with grand gestures or viral moments. It’s built with small, repeated acts of attention. With stopping when you could keep walking. With asking “how was your year?” and meaning it.
Because presence is not a mindset you think your way into. It’s a choice you make when there’s nothing to gain. When no one’s watching. When the moment offers nothing but itself.
May 2026 be less about becoming impressive and more about becoming present.
Less about getting somewhere and more about being here.
Less about the noise of progress and more about the quiet dignity of staying.
Pascal will be on his corner tomorrow. His dog beside him. The bridge waiting.
And I will stop.
Not because I have to.
But because I’ve finally learned what he knew all along:
This, this, is the destination.
The rest is just the long walk home.
Happy New Year Substack!
Stay messy. Stay brave. Stay present always.
Eleni
Every Monday at 10:30 CET, the Glorious Fail shows up to meet you where you are, and push you where you’re meant to go.
Thank you for being part of this community where silence is questioned and honesty is allowed to be unfinished. The Glorious Fail exists for one reason: to say the things we were taught to swallow, and to practice emotional fluency in public.
Read. Linger. Respond. Add your voice if you want. This space becomes what we dare to name together.
The story of Pascal is so beautiful, it’s such a great reminder to be here now. To be present enough as life unfolds. Sending you a big hug and the best wishes for an expansive, beautiful 2026.
A new year present!