Kaş and the Idea of Starting Over

I once met someone on a diving boat in Kaş who told me a story I have never quite forgotten.

He had come there when he was around forty years old.

At first, it was only for a holiday.

One month.

Then he stayed.

He found a way to build a new life there.

I remember listening to him and thinking how simple he made it sound.

Come to Kaş.

Spend a month.

Realize that the life you were living is not the only possible one.

Then start again.

There is something extremely attractive about stories like that.

Especially when you are tired of your own routines.

You imagine that somewhere else there is another version of you waiting to begin.

A version that wakes up early.

Swims in the morning.

Works less.

Reads more.

Knows the names of the people in the small shops.

Owns fewer things.

Needs fewer things.

Has somehow escaped all the unnecessary noise.

Kaş is very good at creating that fantasy.

The sea helps.

The narrow streets help.

The boats help.

The fact that people are there because they chose to be there helps.

You look around and begin to think:

Maybe I could do this too.

Maybe I do not need a dramatic plan.

Maybe one day I could simply stay.

That conversation stayed with me.

So I kept going back to Kaş.

Year after year.

And, as I once wrote, nothing in my life changed very much.

That sentence makes me laugh now because it contains a useful truth.

Places do not change us automatically.

We like to imagine that they do.

We say:

If I lived by the sea, I would be calmer.

If I moved to another city, I would become more social.

If I worked somewhere else, I would finally have time for myself.

If I took a long holiday, I would figure everything out.

Sometimes that happens.

Often, however, we arrive in the new place carrying the same person with us.

The scenery changes.

The habits do not.

The sea is beautiful.

You are still you.

That does not make travel meaningless.

Quite the opposite.

Travel sometimes shows us the difference between wanting a different life and actually being willing to build one.

It is easy to admire somebody who changed everything.

It is harder to ask what they gave up.

What they risked.

What uncertainty they accepted.

What they did on the first morning after deciding not to go back.

A story becomes much more romantic after the difficult parts have already happened.

We usually hear:

“I came for a month and stayed.”

We do not hear every detail in between.

Where did he live?

How did he earn money?

What did his family think?

What did he leave behind?

Was he ever afraid that he had made a terrible mistake?

Did he miss his old life?

Probably.

Starting again sounds clean when reduced to one sentence.

Real life is rarely clean.

Still, I understand why the story affected me.

There is freedom in knowing that a life can change direction even at forty.

Or fifty.

Or later.

We often behave as if our lives become fixed after a certain age.

School.

University.

Work.

Marriage.

A house.

A city.

A routine.

Once enough pieces are in place, moving one of them begins to feel impossible.

But impossible and inconvenient are not the same thing.

Sometimes what we call impossible is simply something that would require us to disappoint expectations, lose comfort, accept uncertainty or start again as a beginner.

That is difficult.

But it is not impossible.

Kaş became associated with that idea for me.

Not because I eventually moved there.

I did not.

Not because every visit transformed me.

It did not.

Maybe that is exactly why the place remained important.

Every time I returned, it quietly asked the same question:

Are you here for a holiday,

or are you trying to escape something?

Those are not the same thing.

A holiday gives you temporary distance from your life.

An escape asks you to change it.

I think many of us confuse the two.

We go somewhere beautiful.

We sleep better.

We eat differently.

We walk more.

We look at the sea.

For a few days, life feels simpler.

Then we return home and recreate almost everything we had wanted to escape.

The same schedule.

The same complaints.

The same habits.

The same excuses.

And then we wait for the next holiday.

Perhaps that is why the man on the diving boat stayed in my memory.

He had apparently crossed the line between imagining another life and accepting the consequences of building one.

I had not.

I simply kept visiting.

There is nothing wrong with that either.

Not every place we love has to become our home.

Sometimes a place exists to remind us that other ways of living are possible.

That alone has value.

Maybe I never needed to move to Kaş.

Maybe I only needed the question Kaş kept asking me.

What exactly would I change if I really wanted a different life?

The city?

The job?

The routine?

The people around me?

Or myself?

Years ago, I joked that I had been going back every year and that nothing in my life had changed.

Now I think that was slightly unfair.

Something had changed.

I had seen somebody prove that starting again was possible.

Once you know that, you can no longer say that life has only one road.

You may still choose the road you are already on.

But at least now you know it is a choice.