Chico
Chico’s smile can light you up and draw you in from even a sideways glance. His deep brown eyes smile. His toothy mouth smiles. Every muscle in his dreadlock framed face smiles. His smile invites you into something special. It makes you feel special, to receive it. It hints of something enchanting beyond the mundane.
He wears nothing but an amazing tan, countless tattoos, all blending into sacred geometrical patterns, and a pair of shorts. The shorts have so many pockets and zippers an instruction manual to them would not be out of order.
He sells bobbles and trinkets and miniature coke spoon jewelry on the beach in Nosara, right next to the mala and Guanacosta wooden bowel selling locals. He blends right in as much as his smile stands out.
“I just got here yesterday,” he informs us, “from Tulum.” Surprising, he looks like he invented the spot. “I’m a nomad, originally from Israel, on my way to my girlfriend’s parent’s house in Colombia to chill for the holidays.”
We stop to converse. How could we not. He twirls two Mayan weapons, which he lights at night to fire dance, and he speaks of dangers in Tulum, wonders in Switzerland, and life as a nomad. He also offers us frog medicine if we’re into that sort of thing. We’re not. We are simply enchanted by this young entrepreneur with the buoyant energy and the stories to match.
He can survive anywhere, I speculate, with a charm so natural and fluid as he demonstrates. What a wonderful trait. What a wonderful gift this conversation is, even though we just met and the only thing we seemingly have in common is the enthusiasm for meeting. Why is that? What is it about him that I want more of myself? What draws me to him with such clear attraction?
“I got robbed last night,” he says, still smiling. There is no sign of victimhood or malice in his face whatsoever. It’s simply a statement of fact. “I was sleeping on the beach, and they took my suitcase. They didn’t get my pack because I was using it as a pillow, and they didn’t want to wake me up. That was lucky.”
I believe him. I believe that in this young man’s life, even getting robbed is part of a grander adventure and can have an element of luck attached to it.
“They took simple things,” he continues. “My shoes and some minor things. But I found my suitcase with some of my clothes down the beach in the morning. This is an interesting place. Still, it feels safer than Tulum.”
And it is. The crime he describes is the worse it gets around Nosara, Costa Rica. Petty theft without direct confrontation or injury. In Tulum he describes a day he saw the Cartel shoot someone in a hotel where he was vending his goods. His smile has appropriate demure when he describes this, but it’s still a smile of acceptance. It’s why he isn’t there anymore.
I walk away from my new amigo, Chico, feeling a bit uplifted, livelier. A latent thought of becoming a digital nomad myself arises and then subsides. What is it about him?
Curiosity, I decide, is the mitigating factor. Chico is innately curious, and that curiosity keeps him here and now, instead of reaching for anything different. The curiosity is contagious as it gets transmitted from his smile to my own and suddenly I, too, am transported from my mind’s calisthenics over wants and desires to my body’s presence in the here and now.
He is embracing his life as a story instead of making up a story up about his life. This presence has a powerful side effect, a form of happiness you can only find when you’re not searching.
