The Doors That Close

On opportunity cost and the lives we don’t live

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I arrived at the farm just outside Botrivier in the Western Cape for twenty-four hours offline, the kind of reset I used to experience in Bali during Nyepi, the day of silence where the entire island shuts down. No phones, no movement, no electricity, no noise. Just a full day of being with yourself, whether you like it or not. I missed it this year, and I felt that absence more than I expected, so I tried to recreate it here.

When I reached the cottage, there were five peacocks waiting at the entrance. Three males, two females. My host pointed out the difference in their feathers, explaining mating season, how the males display, how everything becomes a kind of performance for attention and continuation. They stayed with me most of the afternoon, moving in and out of view, occupying the space in a way that felt both ordinary and slightly surreal, like I had stepped into something that didn’t belong to me.

I came here to be still, but the stillness brought everything forward.

The longer I sat, the more I started thinking about the paths my life has taken, and how far I’ve already walked in certain directions. Being here in South Africa, building something again, I can feel how much of me is rooted in other places. Bali, where I spent years shaping a life that still lives in my body. Nashville, where my family is, where another version of me exists in parallel. Ibiza, where I built a community that felt like home at the time, and has since dissolved into something I can visit only through memory. Los Angeles, my lost city of angels, where I grew into the artist and storyteller that shaped who I am today.

A life builds like that. In layers. In locations. In people. In decisions that feel right as you make them, and then carry forward in ways you only begin to understand later.

The more directions you go in, the more time passes, the more lives you end up living inside one lifetime. And with that, something else happens. The further you go down one path, the more distance grows between you and the others. The doors don’t slam. They settle. They fade. They become less accessible through repetition, through absence, through the simple fact that you are somewhere else now.

Every yes carries weight. It places your time somewhere. It feeds one direction. And in doing that, it withdraws from countless others.

That exchange happens constantly, whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

Sitting there, in a version of silence I had chosen, I found myself moving through memory almost as if it were happening in real time. Indonesia in March, the texture of those days, the way stillness used to feel when it was shared across an entire place. The rhythm of a life that once felt central, now existing alongside this one, but no longer in it.

And here I am, building again. Creating something in South Africa that asks for presence, for attention, for continuity. And I can feel the tension in that. Because to build more here means building less somewhere else. I can’t be in Bali and here at the same time. I can’t maintain every version of my life at full depth across multiple places, no matter how much I’ve tried to.

This path hasn’t unfolded through some clean, intentional arc. It has been shaped by circumstance as much as by choice. Health, environment, logistics, weather, the realities of staying in certain places over time. Mold and respiratory issues. Tropical storms. Driving through flooded roads. Immigration. The practical layers that determine where you can stay, how long you can stay, and what kind of life is actually sustainable.

That is what has led me here. Sitting in front of the fire, I can hear a lion somewhere not far off, a low, rhythmic sound that carries through the dark. There are meerkats just below the cottage. Ostriches across the way that I’ll probably walk toward tomorrow. This place is alive in a way that asks for presence, and I can feel how much I want to meet it fully.

What I have chosen, more than anything, is depth. To go into places, into people, into cultures, into ways of living that feel real. To build something that is rooted in connection, in land, in community. That has been the through line.

But that kind of depth comes with its own cost, especially when it happens across multiple places.

Because when your work is tied to land, to people, to the texture of a place, it asks for continuity. It asks for time. It asks for presence that can’t easily be divided. And every time you shift, even for good reasons, something that was building loses momentum. The threads don’t disappear, but they loosen.

With every shift, there is newness, expansion, the dopamine of discovery, the sense of possibility opening again. And at the same time, there is a closing. Something that had been building reaches a limit. The momentum changes. The version of that life settles into what it became, rather than what it could have continued to be.

I think people who move through the world with a stable structure, a job that travels with them, experience this differently. Their identity holds steady while the location changes.

But when your identity is tied to place, to the relationships you build there, to the depth of immersion, each move carries more weight. You aren’t just changing scenery. You are stepping out of one living system and into another.

I don’t know if there’s a clean way through it.

I just know that sitting there, in that brief window of stillness, I could feel the full weight of it. The life I’m building now, and all the lives that exist alongside it, each one shaped by time, attention, and the doors that have closed along the way.

x Anna