We were never lost.
But the path was never clear either.
Sometimes, a journey doesn’t begin when you set out – it begins when you lose direction.
What feels like getting lost may, in truth, be a quiet invitation to reconsider everything.
In the summer of 1988, it all began with one sentence from my father.
He suddenly decided he wanted to become an explorer.
Yes, my father – the man who would often get so lost in thought that my mother used to ask me to stand by the door and wave at him when his car approached, just to make sure he didn’t accidentally drive into the neighbor’s driveway.
Still, the car would sometimes go all the way to the end of the street… then slowly return, as if it had just remembered the right address.
This same man regularly relied on us to locate his keys, or would ask – visibly confused –
“Was it right after the traffic light, or left by the grocery store?”
Back then, I didn’t know what went on in his mind.
How could someone be entirely present in a conversation, and then – just like that – vanish?
He’d be listening, yes, but somehow not really hearing.
Over time, I learned to distinguish between the father who was truly engaged and the one whose thoughts had drifted far away.
And strangely enough, in both cases, his words still sounded logical – even persuasive. Always composed.
This man, so immersed in thought that he could barely navigate a grocery aisle, woke up one morning, sipped his coffee, took a long breath of silence, and then – with a mixture of solemnity and theatrical flair – waved both hands in the air and declared:
“We’re going to Egypt… to discover what has yet to be discovered!”
He wasn’t an archaeologist.
He wasn’t a seasoned adventurer.
He was a thinker – a man who spent most of his time solving riddles and diving into oceans of books.
But it seemed that some obscure documentary he’d watched the night before, or perhaps a quirky article in a morning paper, had awakened in him an ancient dream – one that had been asleep since the time of the pharaohs themselves.
And just like that – with no real introduction – our regular summer vacation turned into an “expedition,” and my father transformed into a 19th-century field explorer.
As for us – the family – we found ourselves preparing to travel, still not entirely convinced this wasn’t all just a joke.
Egypt had never been in our plans.
But this joke booked plane tickets, a hotel overlooking the Nile, and brought along a hat that looked suspiciously like those worn by tomb-raiding archaeologists.
We checked into a dusty old hotel with a narrow room overlooking the river – a space with a strange kind of charm, as if it were caught between two eras.
The next morning, we went down to the breakfast hall before him.
And then, he appeared – wearing something we had never seen on him before:
A desert-colored linen shirt, wide-pocketed pants, a round explorer’s hat, and a leather bag that looked like it might be hiding a papyrus scroll.
My mother stared at him for a moment, then sighed with a tired smile:
“Well, at least you didn’t bring a camel… Did you tie it to the hotel door?”
He didn’t smile.
Instead, he raised his finger toward the ceiling as if he were seeing something the rest of us could not, and said:
“No taxis. We’ll walk the city the way locals do.
Stories are born in crowded corners – not under towering monuments.”
I looked up toward where he was pointing.
There was only a decorated wall with a few carvings in the breakfast hall.
Before I could react, my mother nudged me in her usual way, and her eyes seemed to say:
“Don’t follow his finger… follow the idea.”
That sentence stayed with me.
We often focus on what someone points to, and miss what they mean.
We watch the finger, not the thought.
We understand the motion, but miss the meaning.
Sometimes, we lose the truth because we’re too fixated on the surface of things.
And so, the adventure began.
We boarded a cramped minibus that barely had room for breath, then another vehicle that seemed to struggle for breath itself.
We wandered through alleyways and markets, and at every turn, my father would point at a faded wall or a worn-out sign and whisper:
“Look… don’t you see something?”
Then he’d begin explaining those markings with passion –
Even though they were nothing more than a child’s scribble or a peeling detergent ad, with no trace of pharaohs in sight.
But to him, it was all part of the discovery.
The journey had begun long before we’d reach the pyramids.
As for us, all we noticed were the heat, the exhaustion, and the screeching brakes.
Time passed.
Faces and streets started to blur.
We began to suspect that we weren’t getting closer to the pyramids at all – we were moving away from them.
And just when we reached the height of fatigue, we found ourselves – suddenly – in the overwhelming chaos of Ramses Station, Cairo’s central railway terminal.
Yes, Ramses Station.
Roughly twenty kilometers away from the pyramids…
While our hotel, at the beginning of this so-called journey, had been barely three.
My mother slumped onto a wooden bench, clutching her bag like she was holding onto the last thread of her sanity.
She looked at him and, with barely restrained fury, said:
“We were closer… how did we end up farther?”
He, on the other hand, sat down with a calmness that bordered on pride.
As if he had just made a grand discovery.
And then he said:
“You’re not afraid because something frightening happened…
You’re only afraid because you lost control.”
That sentence cracked something open in me.
Fear doesn’t always come from the unknown.
It often comes from losing the illusion that we’re in charge.
Danger isn’t always around us – sometimes, it’s within us…
In that subtle panic when we can no longer trace the path, or predict the next step.
Fear needs no cause.
It’s enough to lose control – and the shadows begin to stretch.
And in that moment – when the noise around us softened, as if time itself had paused – I looked at the tired faces, the wooden benches, at my father sitting there like a man who had arrived without ever moving…
And I understood something I had never grasped before:
We weren’t lost.
We were exactly where chaos wanted us to be.
Not standing at the foot of a pyramid.
Not on the edge of some ancient discovery.
But here – in Ramses Station – in the heart of the noise,
in the lap of randomness that had chosen us before we could choose anything at all.
And perhaps… chaos was wiser than our plans.
What happened afterward…
was something I could never have imagined.
My father’s dream – a dream that once seemed like a passing joke – didn’t come true there,
but it took its very first step in the farthest place our minds could’ve imagined.
