WØ/MAN

Although, as human beings, we are undeniably united by life’s great certainties — birth, loss, the passing of time — I’ve come to believe that the choices we make and the endless variables that unfold from them are what ultimately define our lives.

From this empirical and relativistic perspective, human experience diverges enormously from one person to another: ambitions, desires, satisfactions and disappointments reshape our systems of values, the rhythm of our days and even our perception of time itself.

For instance, someone like me, who has spent more than a decade navigating the microcosm of the world’s fashion and film capitals, may unexpectedly feel a deeper sense of familiarity with someone briefly encountered in New York or Paris than with a person who shares my upbringing, but leads an entirely different way of life.

Finding myself in January on an island in northern Norway, in a hamlet of barely forty residents, inevitably forced something inside me to dramatically resize itself.

During winter in Dønna there is very little to do. There are no bars, no clubs, no restaurants. The few people you meet on the island look at you with curiosity, but it is a discreet, almost silent kind, typical of those who have consciously chosen such isolation. No one truly concerns themselves with your anxieties, your career, or the life you left behind.

The beauty of visiting remote places, untouched by the machinery of mass tourism, is that for few days you are granted the rare luxury of escaping yourself — your routines, your identity — and imagining, even if only for few days, that you could be someone else.

Everything forces you into the present moment. There is no endless noise of distractions to consume, no trendy places to chase in the hope of securing a reservation, no anxiety that something better might be happening somewhere else. No useless information. No one and nothing screaming for your attention.

On the island, there are twenty hours of darkness and only four hours of soft light — four precious hours suspended between a sunrise and a sunset that dissolve seamlessly into one another.

Time itself seems to stand still in the blinding contrast between the warmth of the light and the snow, and its slow rhythm becomes perceptible only through the mountains which, as the light shifts across them, appear to change expression and observe you, patiently waiting for you to come closer and truly discover them.

Perhaps the things that genuinely hold value in life are meant to be approached in the same way: through a sincere desire to deepen your connection with something — not out of urgency, performance, or the need to belong, but simply because you consciously chose it.