Episode 6: Strawberries and Blueberries

EPISODE 6: STRAWBERRIES AND BLUEBERRIES

After Peggy, the woman with the photo album, I couldn’t breathe right.

Like no matter what kind of life I chose—conventional, adventurous, romantic, solitary—I’d eventually get trapped in the same way she had:

in a story I couldn’t stop telling.

One that once felt vital, but slowly calcified until it was the only thing left.

Her voice, her photos, her gaze at the empty jewelry drawer—they stuck with me.

She hadn’t just lived her story.

She’d been defined by it.

And now it lived her.

I didn’t want that.

I didn’t want to arrive at eighty with a head full of repetition and a heart full of ache.

But how do you avoid that? How do you not get caught in the net of your own narrative?

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I kept thinking of someone—someone I’d met, who seemed to have let go of all that.

But I couldn’t place them yet.

Just flashes.

Sidewalk heat.

Bright blue eyes.

A carton of strawberries.

I let the memory drift.

For now, I had an appointment.

Welcome to Go and Find Out. I’m Jonny Wright.

This is a story of losing yourself in the world.

I left my home, my job, and the USA in order to learn the old-fashioned way: with first-hand experience.

Some people go on a journey to find themselves. I went on a journey to lose myself—and instead find the world.

In these episodes, I ask big questions about life, not from an armchair but from roadsides and mountaintops, from temple halls and dance halls.

Join me as I hitchhike across the world, embrace the unexpected, and let go, one step at a time.

If you’ve ever thought about living a life outside the box, keep listening.

Because this isn’t just my story. It’s about what happens when you start to wonder what your story could be.

You don’t need to hitchhike around the world. There are ways you can choose to live with more courage, more curiosity, and more adventure, right here, right now.

And at the end of the show, we’ve got some very thoughtful mail with a practical discussion around decision making. So stick around for that.

Alright, let’s go and find out.

I was back in Brussels, just for a day or two. And I was supposed to meet up with Mia—a friend of a friend, and someone I had a feeling might help me work through all this.

We’d planned to walk through Bois de la Cambre, a sprawling park on the southern edge of the city.

Maybe it sounds like a stretch—hoping a casual walk could reorient your whole life.

But sometimes you don’t need a breakthrough.

You just need someone else to talk to.

To press against your thoughts and see if they hold.

And I had questions.

About stories.

About selves.

About whether any of us ever really get to start fresh.

We met in the morning, under gray skies and pale light.

The paths in Bois de la Cambre were still damp from the night’s rain.

Gravel stuck to my shoes. The air smelled faintly of moss and hydrangeas.

Mia greeted me with a hug that was both firm and light.

She was older than me, and had a way of carrying herself—shoulders back, eyes open—a kind of European sternness that risked rigidity.

But when she smiled, she really smiled.

We started walking without much of a plan.

Around us: joggers, birthday parties, kids shouting in French.

She asked how my travels were going, and I gave the usual update.

Then I asked about her life, not out of politeness, but because I needed to hear what kind of story she was making out of it.

She paused for a moment, then smiled.

“Well,” she said, “there are many ways to tell it.”

I called her up later and asked her why there are many ways to tell it. She said this:

“I think this evolution is constant, it depends like where we would take a picture, in which moment of time, because there are many different versions of earlier me. There are not just two persons, you know? It’s the same person evolving over the time.’

She didn’t dodge.

She just refused to commit to a single picture, a single thread.

She said, “I could tell the story of my life as a professional. Or as a mother. Or as a lover. Or a daughter. There’s no one version.”

I frowned. “But doesn’t it still all add up to something? One arc?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s not a thread. It’s a weave.”

She stopped walking and gestured with her hands.

“Like a painting seen too close—one brushstroke, one patch of color. You step back, and it becomes something else entirely.”

Then she reached into her bag, pulled out a clear plastic carton, and popped a blueberry in her mouth.

Something flashed through my mind.

Not a name. Not a face.

Just the blur of summer light.

The texture of sun-warmed plastic.

I shook it off.

We kept walking.

It was clear: Mia hadn’t fallen into the same trap as Peggy.

She was still writing her life. Still revising.

But even Mia, with her weave, still winced at her past.

When I asked how she felt toward her earlier selves, she said:

“Regretful.’”

We looped through a dip in the land. The path darkened under trees.

I noticed my body—loose again, like it had been holding something tight.

Then she said:

“Sometimes it’s about not having sufficient courage to try something.”

And that’s when it hit me.

Not a memory—a person.

The blur came first:

Sidewalk heat.

Sunlight bending through plastic.

A name Sharpied on a maroon suitcase.

A man with a yoga mat.

Blue eyes. Strawberries.

And then the whole story came rushing back.

Peggy had shown me what it looked like to live inside a myth too long.

Mia had offered an opening—a way to move without erasing.

But Goga…

Goga didn’t weave.

He didn’t thread.

He didn’t trap or escape.

He’d burned the whole loom down.

Of course.

It was him.

Goga.

It was New York.

A year ago. My first hitchhiking trip.

I’d been circling Central Park, restless, unsatisfied.

The city kept dazzling, but I couldn’t find the thing I was after—

not just connection, but something rarer. Something un-scripted.

I was caught between comfort and leap.

Between who I’d been and whatever came next.

As I made my way over the uneven cobblestones of 5th Ave, I made the pact. A pact with myself.

Next person I see—I talk to them. No matter who it is.

The deal was struck and up ahead, there he was.

A tall man in his early 40s hunched over a notebook on a yoga mat on a bench.

Hair like straw in a storm.

Writing fast, like he was trying to keep up with lightning.

I asked what he was writing.

He looked up, eyes clear, accent thick as stone polished by water.

“I am writing my thoughts.”

I almost laughed.

Can’t say I haven’t done plenty of that myself.

He invited me to sit. I did.

Then the words came—cinema, philosophy, Deleuze, rhizomes, dreams.

I didn’t follow some of it.

But I didn’t need to.

He had that rare quality: the ability to make ideas feel alive, even when you don’t fully grasp them.

“I’m Goga,” he said. “From Georgia. The country, not the state.”

I also called up Goga later, to talk about that day:

“I need sometimes time to check out my English vocabulary in my mind. But I try to be not fast, but I want to be good.”

Sitting together on the bench, I asked him. “So what brings you to New York?”

He smiled. The same way someone smiles when they’ve remembered a joke they’re not sure you’ll get.

“It was a very spontaneous decision for me, because of love.”

“And where in the city are you living?”

“I live here,” he said.

Upper East Side? I thought. Impressive.

“No,” he said, gesturing down at the yoga mat. “Right here.”

“You live… here? On this bench?”

He grinned. “Yes. It is my studio. And my bedroom. And my embassy.”

And I just sat there.

Processing.

A man who left his comfortable European life to live on a yoga mat in Central Park.

Not because he lost something. But because he chose to.

To live this way.

On purpose.

A part of me was magnetized, another part was repulsed.

He’d initially come for love, another Georgian artist named Anna who he’d met in New York on a previous trip. But when his money ran out, he decided he would stay on, living outside.

“I don’t care about everything. And when I say it was childish, it was emotional, imaginary, it was everything like love. Love make people crazy, and I’m very happy about this. I think it happen not so often in our lives, something like this. You know, it was really delusion, it was really…”

I felt the assumptions pile up in my brain.

Is he running from something? Is he okay?

Is this performance? Protest? Addiction?

He smiled again, wide and warm, like he could see every thought I was having and had already forgiven them.

“I follow my impulses,” he said. “If they are kind.”

I blinked.

He pulled a crumpled book from his suitcase—the Upanishads, I think—and flipped to a dog-eared page.

Then closed it again.

That’s when I noticed the suitcase.

It wasn’t full of clothes.

But books.

A portable library dragged across the city.

He didn’t own a working phone.

When he wanted to message me, he went to the Apple Store, downloaded Instagram on one of the demo iPads, and typed slowly with one finger.

That first day, I walked away stunned.

He said we’d meet again tomorrow. Same time, different park.

“Union Square Park,” he said. “There’s good sun.”

My intrigue–and confusion–only grew that night, as I thought of Goga lying down to sleep amidst the hubbub of the city on a church doorstep. How could he make it work? How could he possibly be ok with it?

The next day, I found him sitting on the grass, back straight, face to the breeze.

The suitcase beside him like a dog keeping watch.

I asked how he was doing.

He said, “Hungry.”

He stood up, strolled over to a trash can. I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. He reached in, and when his hand came up, it was carrying a carton of strawberries.

Fresh. Plump. Perfect.

Then—calmly—he walked them over to the water fountain, rinsed them one by one, and held the carton out to me.

“Please.”

I stared at them. “You just… found those?”

He nodded.

“Finding food was very easy.”

I hesitated. Then picked one up, looked at it warily. I try to keep an open mind, but this was a stretch.

The strawberry was warm from the sun, cold from the water, and exploded like summer in my mouth.

I laughed. Out loud.

I couldn’t help it.

He looked pleased.

Then sat back down and said, “This is enough.”

And in that moment he seemed to be right.

“Something very interesting was that whatever you find is all you have. I cannot choose something. What I find is what I have.”

Over the next few days, we kept meeting.

Not through texts. Not through plans.

Just intuition and Apple Store DMs.

We’d meet in parks—Union Square, Riverside, Central.

Always outside.

Always somewhere the sun could find us.

When I asked if he ever missed having a home, he shrugged.

“I have home. You are sitting in it. Everywhere is my home”

He told me about his suitcase—and the books that had passed through it.

Philosophy. Cinema theory. Metaphysics.

Plato, Hegel, the Bhagavad Gita.

“Most people collect things,” he said. “I just let them go.”

I asked how he made it work—no job, no address.

“When I needed food, I would get up and start walking, you know, only walking. If I followed my intuition, without any searching, then I would find food very quickly, as if someone had left it for me.”

Then he offered me a half-eaten bagel he’d found that morning and changed the subject.

“You know, before you came to me, I remember I was sitting near central park, and reading or writing, I don’t remember so exactly, but for this time, maybe one or two weeks, I thought about friend, and so you came. I don’t know how, but you came.”

And being with him made me feel lighter.

One day I asked what was next for him.

He blinked. “What is… next?”

I tried to clarify: “Like… will you stay in New York? Go back to Europe?”

He stared at me like I’d asked what color wind was.

We sat quietly, watching the river blink with light.

Goga wasn’t trying to achieve anything.

He wasn’t looking for transcendence.

He was just living.

Minute to minute.

So of course, I had to ask: Did he have a story?

“I think we all have our stories. But that’s not the point for me. What’s more important for me is to move into the unknown future with the flow. This is my point of view. Of course everyone has some story, but for me it’s more important what I said, to move into unknown future.”

I’ll admit it: there was a part of me that wanted to say “do something! Get a job! Take care of yourself.” There was some bias, some almost disgust at what he was willing to live with. I mean, he ate straight out of the trash…

But then, I couldn’t argue with his joy. That infectious smile. However harshly you judged him, you couldn’t say he was unhappy.

Even mischievous.

Once, he told me he’d wondered what his own piss tasted like.

So he drank it. Just to know.

And his feces, well…

It was funny—and there was a twinkle in his eye.

But he wasn’t entirely joking.

And somehow, in his mouth, even the absurd became sacred.

It was like being with a philosopher from another planet.

Or a monk who forgot to become official.

I thought I’d been extreme.

Hitchhiking across the country. Couchsurfing.

After all, I was the experimenter! But Goga was on a whole other level. And he was opening my mind. It was possible to go further. To think bigger. To let go even more.

I walked home that night buzzing.

Goga’s life—it shook something loose in me.

I didn’t want to be him.

But I wondered: What are the boundaries I’ve set for myself? Do they need to be where they are?

That’s when a strange thought entered my mind. You’d probably call it another bad idea.

I’d been thinking a lot about the road ahead.

Eastern Europe. Long gaps between towns. Cold shoulders at gas stations.

Sleeping outside wasn’t a thought experiment anymore.

It was looming. Likely.

So why not try now? In New York, of all places—the so-called dangerous city.

An immunization, I told myself.

A controlled burn.

I mentioned it to my friend—the one I was crashing with.

He looked at me like I’d suggested chewing glass for breakfast.

“There’s absolutely no need to do that,” he said.

“Literally no one’s asking you to sleep outside.”

And he was right.

No one was asking.

I had no gear. Not even a yoga mat like Goga.

But I couldn’t shake it.

I didn’t want my edge to be hypothetical.

I wanted to touch it.

Goga had told me, “Pier 84. By the water, you dream better.”

We agreed on 9 p.m.

I packed what little I had—backpack, water bottle, toothbrush, a few shirts in need of a wash—and stepped into the dark with something close to dread.

The park was quiet when I arrived.

Sky the color of old bruises.

The last joggers vanished into shadows.

Laughter flared and faded next to Bluetooth speakers.

I scanned the benches.

No Goga.

.: 10:30

Still no Goga.

And no way to reach him.

The Apple Store was closed.

Maybe something had happened to him.

Maybe this was a mistake.

Maybe I wasn’t cut out for this.

Go back, whispered a voice. Just try again another night.

But the grass beneath my feet was real.

And the night had already begun.

I found a patch under a tree.

Spread my jacket.

Laid down.

The earth felt alien—damp and uneven.

The city’s breath pressed in from all sides: voices, sirens, the river close by.

Somewhere, a couple fought quietly in another language.

A dog barked twice and fell silent.

I put in earplugs to soften the noise.

But they didn’t soften me.

My body stayed taut.

Heart slow but loud.

Like a soldier who’d lost the war but refused to lower his weapon.

I must have drifted—twenty minutes, maybe.

Then: light. Swinging beams. Voices.

Flashlights cut the dark like knives.

I blinked against it. Tried to disappear into the grass.

But the beams kept coming.

Closer.

Then: a flashlight in my face.

“Sir, you have to exit the park. It’s closed.”

Two NYPD officers. Civil. Unmoved.

I sat up. So did others.

A quiet exodus of the unchosen.

I joined them.

Half-asleep figures with backpacks and blankets

rising like ghosts

and walking out.

And that’s when the doubt surged.

Hot, immediate, choking.

What was I doing? I was just another privileged white guy looking for danger. What did I know about real risk?

I stood at the edge of the Hudson, blinking into the lights of Jersey,

wondering how to get myself out of this.

It was an experiment gone too far.

I stopped my hand from reaching for my phone. No, it’s not over. This wasn’t about masquerading as homeless. It actually had nothing to do with the experience of real homelessness. It was simply that personal barrier that I had the instinct to cross.

And even all my doubting wasn’t going to stop me.

I started walking.

Hell’s Kitchen was hollow at that hour.

Closed bodegas, flashing walk signs.

Steam curled from vents like breath in the dark.

The air smelled like vinegar and burnt sugar and rats.

On 43rd, I found it—a shallow concrete alcove beside a gray wall.

Anonymous. Dry.

I knelt down like a shadow, and curled around my pack.

The cement was hard.

The streetlamp above me buzzed like a mosquito in my brain.

And then it began.

The senseless, pounding night.

Every footstep was a warning.

Every gust of wind carried a question.

Was that voice angry?

Are they coming closer?

I imagined how easy it would be for someone walking by to land a kick in my ribs.

Images flashed before me. Drive by shootings, muggings, robberies.

My whole system felt like a car on blocks, revving and revving and revving. It would just keep going until it ran out of gas.

I pulled my jacket tighter, turned over again, and whispered the only prayer I could remember:

It won’t last forever.

It won’t last forever.

It can’t last forever.

And then—

morning.

The sky softened.

The wind changed.

Somewhere, a trash lid slammed shut and someone cursed.

I sat up.

The alcove, in daylight, looked absurd.

Pitiful.

Harmless.

Just a slab of cement, marked by my shape and nothing else.

I walked to Penn Station.

Brushed my teeth beside men in suits, construction workers, and tourists checking train times.

I was tired.

Nothing had changed. The sun had gone down and come up again. I’d laid down and stood up again.

There was no barrier there. The words “sleep on the streets of New York” dissolved in front of me.

I’d done it.

The world hadn’t ended.

There’d been no heroism in it.

The only resistance was in my mind.

But it was a line.

A threshold.

And I’d crossed it.

That’s the thing about Goga.

He didn’t ask me to become him.

He just made the walls around me feel… less solid.

The memory recedes. Mia is still next to me. In the park, in Brussels.

The breeze lifted the hair from her face.

We walked back along the still-wet gravel. The birthdays were over.

And my question had been answered.

Peggy had shown me what happens when a story becomes a prison.

Mia had shown me it doesn’t have to.

And Goga?

He’d burned the whole narrative down.

So it was possible to live without a story.

I just didn’t know yet if I could live that way.

We reached the edge of the park, where the traffic started again.

And something inside me took shape, as I thought of Goga’s wild, uncharted path.

Life can be even more than a weave. It can bloom.

I turned to Mia.

She looked over.

“Mia,” I said, “your life is still so very open.”

She paused—then smiled.

And in that moment, I felt it echo back.

Mine was open too.

...Mine was open too.

That was the day Mia and I became friends. Even though I’d be far away, we’d call each other up every other month and continue the conversation.

As for Goga, well, things never really materialized with Anna, the woman he loved. He spent six months on the New York streets, and after that returned to Europe.

He lives in Austria now, painting.

He’s not seeking, he says. Just living out his days, and he’s happy whenever something happens.

Now is that a story?

Maybe my life is still very open.

But openness is one thing in theory.

It’s something else when the past walks through the door.

Openness is a privilege—until someone shows up carrying a version of you that you never meant to keep.

I was about to visit Dale—my old college roommate who’d moved to Brussels.

We hadn’t spoken in years.

And I could already feel it tightening—

the story he’d expect, the story I’d want to offer.

Proof I’d grown. Proof I’d become someone new.

Which meant… I’d probably start performing again.

Trying to write the better version of myself, right there in front of him.

Which was exactly what I’d been trying to escape.

So maybe you can live without a story.

But not when someone else arrives holding the old script.

I wasn’t sure.

I walked up the steps to his place.

Paused at the door.

Raised my hand to knock.

And stopped.

That’s it for this episode of Go and Find Out. Thanks for spending this time with me—seriously. It means a lot that you’re here, listening to this story.

This show is created by me, Jonny Wright, with music by me, except where otherwise noted. And yall, we’re in it. These episodes are literally being recorded week to week. Today, it’s May 20th, and this episode is set to go live May 22nd. Each week I’m working my tail off to bring you this story in the best possible form.

Also, I want to say: this episode is not meant at all as having anything to do with the experience of homelessness. Goga and I had choices, and sleeping outside was a choice made out of curiosity. I’m not trying to liken our experiences in any way to being unhoused, an experience hundreds of thousands are facing every day in the States. Just want to make that clear.

If you’re enjoying the ride, hit subscribe so new episodes come straight to you every Thursday. And hey—if you’ve got a second, leaving a quick review or rating really helps spread the word.

Here’s a bit of mail I got this week from Will. He writes:

graduated from University in: 2019

Thanks for sending this in, WIll. I resonate with what you’re saying. That feeling like maybe nothing will change. Maybe I’ll never get to a place where I can feel fulfilled and active.

Now, I’m not a mental health professional, and I’m really not qualified to give advice, because I’m learning just like you.

But, to answer your question, YES. I felt a lot of excuses and doubts bubble up. There are a whole lot of great reasons NOT to do something bold and lifegiving.

It’s not easy.

Here’s how I dealt with that before my trip. There were three steps: I played with the idea, then I made the decision, then I took irreversible action.

It’s great to play with an idea. Let it come out. Say it to someone, what would you like to happen?

After that idea continues to feel vital, then it’s time to make the decision. Now there’s a lot that goes into making a decision, and I can talk about the nuts and bolts of decision making another time, but all I’ll say here is that the decision has to be made when you really feel yourself. When you feel present, clear-eyed, calm.

And sometime after the decision, you need to take irreversible action. What is the step towards that path that you can’t take back? For this, you need boldness, so it might happen at a different time than the decision itself. Decision requires clarity and calm, action requires boldness.

For me, it was setting up a sublet of my spot in the house where I lived, and taking a leave of absence from my job. Those things I couldn’t easily take back, and once the wheels were set in motion, the situation itself pushed me out. I didn’t have to exhaust myself everyday trying to push myself. The situation pushed me instead.

There’s so much more to be said about this topic. I even wrote up a whole thing on efficiency in decision making to keep us from exhaustion, but unless there’s a real interest, I’ll stop there.

I’d love to hear from you—thoughts, stories, weird travel tips, whatever’s on your mind. Drop me a line at goandfindoutpod@gmail.com, and I’ll do my best to write you back.

And more than anything, I hope this episode sparked something—however small.

A question, a dream, a reminder that your life is still unfolding.

Alright, that’s all I got. See you next time.

Until then.