I stood looking up at the bronze statue of Ernest Hemingway.
An impossibly clear Spanish morning stretched overhead. A bright blue sky without a cloud in sight, broken only by the canopy of trees surrounding Plaza de Toros. Hemingway stood beneath them, kept cool in the shade while thousands of people in white and red streamed past toward the opening day of San Fermín.
Behind him hung a banner celebrating the 100th anniversary of The Sun Also Rises. A hundred years later, people were still making the pilgrimage because of a story.
I wondered if he ever imagined this.
"I wonder what he would've thought of this?" I asked a few people from the hostel I was staying at.
The rest of the group didn't seem particularly interested in standing around a statue. Maybe it was the sangria. Maybe they were just excited for the week ahead.
We traced the route of the Running of the Bulls through the narrow streets of Pamplona. About half a mile from the corrals to Plaza de Toros. It's hard to imagine now, but long before Instagram or travel blogs, this tiny stretch of road became known around the world because of a single novel.
I stayed for another minute.
I kept wondering what Hemingway would've thought if he could see thousands of people still showing up a century later because of a story he wrote.
Then the question changed.
What would younger Kyle have thought?
The last time I published something was in 2019.
Back then, I wrote like someone who thought he knew something. Maybe even everything. Every essay seemed to end with some neat conclusion about what life meant or what I'd learned that year. Looking back, I don't know how much of those thoughts were actually mine and how much I'd borrowed from books, sermons, podcasts, or the people around me. Either way, I wrote with certainty.
Then I stopped.
In 2020, I left the church. I left a version of myself that had an answer for almost everything. Around the same time, life started changing faster than I knew how to keep up with.
I got married.
Started a new career.
Bought a house.
Pack up and moved to New York City. (Yes, in that order)
Traveled to dozens of countries.
Made friends.
Lost friends.
Became an uncle. Then an uncle again.
Ran a marathon. Signed up for another.
Started learning piano. Quit. Started again. Quit again. Now it mostly sits in my closet.
Same with guitar.
Painted a little.
Drank a few beers.
Then a few more than a few.
Got a dog.
Got divorced. (Yes, in that order.)
Learned to snowboard.
Learned to scuba.
Learned to surf.
Somewhere in all of that, I became less certain of who I was.
Oddly enough, I think that's been one of the healthiest things that's ever happened to me.
Standing beneath Hemingway's statue, I realized something.
When I was younger, I didn't admire Hemingway because I wanted to live like him.
I admired him because I wanted to write like him.
More than that, I wanted to have life figured out. Writing was how I convinced myself that I did. And tried to convince everyone else I did too. Every essay ended with a lesson. Every story had a conclusion. If I could put my thoughts into words, maybe that meant they were true.
Now I admire Hemingway for a different reason.
He lived.
He moved through the world with curiosity. Paris. Spain. Cuba. He paid attention. Then he wrote about it.
Somewhere along the way, I think I got the order backwards. I spent years trying to become a writer when I probably just needed to become someone with something worth writing about.
I thought I was collecting stories.
Looking back, I was collecting change.
Some of it was exciting. Learning to surf. Moving to New York. Traveling to countries I'd only ever seen on maps.
Some of it wasn't. Leaving my faith. Losing friendships. Getting divorced. Learning to let go of a version of my life I thought would last forever.
None of it felt like it was leading anywhere while I was living it.
But somewhere in the middle of all that change, I became someone my younger self never could've imagined. Someone I think he would be proud of.
I'm more interested in questions now.
How do people build meaningful lives?
What makes someone happy?
Why do certain places stay with us?
What makes us fall in love with a city, another person, or even a version of ourselves?
I don't know if I'll ever answer those questions. I don't think that's really the point anymore.
If there's one thing that's stayed consistent over the past six years, it's curiosity.
I hope I never lose that.
I want it to be the through line of my life. To keep saying yes to things I don't understand yet. To put myself in places where I'm the least experienced person in the room. To keep traveling. To keep making things. To keep changing my mind. To keep collecting little truths instead of pretending I've found one big one.
Over the last six years, one thing has become true.
I'm less sure of who I am than I've ever been.
And somehow, I've never been more confident that I'll figure it out.
"We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master."
- Ernest Hemingway