The sun slowly stitched itself into the ocean’s horizon, hemmed by the glowing clouds, and the sky melted into a sea of gold and crimson.
A scenery that is capable of taking the soul on a journey of a carousel of introspection.
The salty tang of the breeze and the squabbling of the birds took me back to Point Pedro Ocean Road briefly with nostalgia. The bike rides with my father in the evenings when I was a young boy in Sri Lanka. The sounds of grinding gears and our own laboured breathing—in, out, in, out, in, out—while our conversation competed with the crashing sound of strong waves against the rocks.
Now, many decades later, I was watching the foam-covered waves crash onto the Hawaiian shore, cooling the hot sand before sliding back into the sea. Having a chilled Californian Chardonnay was refreshing and tingly while soothing my senses. A balanced middle ground, which I needed badly after spending many years on Bay Street.
My tongue is coated with American aroma. Clearly, my Canadian elbows are down. And always have been. Because I knew I was where I belonged.
It’s past 5 p.m., and I’m tucked away on a lanai for hours that sits along a long stretch of beach somewhere between Lahaina and Kapalua—the kind of place curated with intentional calm, the sort of feeling Hawaii seems to guarantee every time.
I was bumping against the walls of heaven. This has been our family's happy place for many years! But a very long way from the concrete canyon of Toronto.
I could see the crumpled receipts from an overpriced car rental through the parted curtain swinging rhythmically to the soft breeze, and an iPhone charger buzzing against the wood-trimmed lamp, and my fingers bleeding onto this outdated, thick, heavy laptop; it’s too blunt an instrument to enjoy this moment properly.
Regardless, on some mornings when no one is around, the pull of the past seems a little more palpable, like a moment of déjà vu played backwards, instantly familiar, and makes me nostalgic for a past that I hadn't quite let go of yet.
Other days, that same past seems like a different life, one lived by a different person.
It has been more than two years since I hung up my corporate cleats!
However, I still sometimes feel the air that carries the sharp, ghost of powerful, concentrated commercial-grade detergents the major chain hotels use clinging to my clothes. It mixes with the stale scent of overworked electronics and the faint detergent of freshly washed sheets.
My suits always hang on me like armour. I forgot to take it off, the tie still knotted, the fabric warm from hours of friction and movement. My eyes were always mostly red and tired.
Then, I got to an age where I had stopped believing in reinvention.
That’s the age when I realized my patterns had hardened, and ambition narrowed into maintenance, and my barometer for corporate bullshit became extremely sensitive.
When entitled pugnacious, perfervid, milksops with their piffle started to annoy me, I stopped asking what else might be possible and focused instead on what could be sustained. I was sitting in a corner office then—good view, decent title, predictable compensation—telling myself this was what stability looked like.
But that's where comfort could become a coffin. I was well aware!
My enthusiasm for fast-paced corporate life declined rapidly, as all professionals must feel, after being on the road for a long-time raising capital and making investor pitches. I was not getting any shrewder—or smarter—as an investment industry executive.
Don't stop when you're tired, stop when you're done. I was basically done—or on my way to being done. My brain knew it. My heart knew it. Felt like I was living inside a monochromatic void—predictable days, rehearsed urgency, with deterioration of purpose.
So, I quit.
The investment business I participated in very much was esurient and calculating but rewarded emotional endurance in its own way. I was a recipient of this. If you can tolerate a long absence from family, the indolence of obtuse coworkers, and long stretches of quiet fear and occasional fake smiles disguised as confidence, you can last.
I understood hierarchy, consequence, and the unspoken rules that governed who advanced and who quietly disappeared. I knew how to perform competently even when company-wide conviction was thinning. In that world, avoidance is the default switch as long as the sales results keep coming. I rejected mediocrity and its baleful impact on the mind.
When the world was upended by the global pandemic, a few things were nagging at me for a very long time—as I hunkered down in my home office as the video screen flickered to a remote work life.
The marble surface counter in front of me looked like a mind spilled open. The half-written notes of inspiration to my team were strewn across its surface, clinging to the edge like they paid rent to be here. My pulse ticked faster than the digital clock on the corner of my computer screen.
As an Executive—for the largest independent Asset Manager in Canada, I was tasked with virtually leading a large, distributed team across this vast country, to build back from the effects of the pandemic on our business.
I enjoy engineering the human mind. That was my playground as a sales executive. I loved being on a call with a client, hearing their tone shift when they realized they were about to level up. That knowledge is too powerful to be left outside a paywall.
Ambition was the only thing awake with me, burning hot, burning fast, burning recklessly, the way unstable economies collapse under their own weight. And somehow, in this well-lit room, the COVID consciousness started creeping in; there it was, in the nether recesses of my mind, niggling away.
I was trying to escape corporate mediocrity. Then I found writing. There is no money in it. But it was rewarding.
It wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t a pivot. It was a private act of defiance against a structured life that had grown too contained, and I was constricted by it. This thought got stuck in my head like a song on repeat.
Well, now I want to articulate what I was seeing—how risk was framed, how certainty was sold, how people slowly traded corporate friendship for control. I assumed the audience would be small and specific: a few people inside the business who might recognize the truth beneath the language. The ambition was intentionally limited. A short reflection. A modest internal audit. Proof that I could still say something unvarnished without consequences.
I wrote three chapters of Prisoner #1056 and waited. The phone didn’t ring. Each day I checked my email, expecting nothing. Silence felt familiar. I had learned to read it correctly—not as rejection, but as confirmation that staying inside the lines was safer and ultimately more realistic. I had built a career on understanding probabilities, and this one felt easy to calculate.
Then I got the call. It was Michael Levine, the eminent Canadian literary agent, who once denounced me and then changed his mind. The rest was history.
The sensation wasn’t excitement. It was destabilization. The careful architecture of my life—built on predictability, managed risk, and incremental gain—suddenly felt provisional.
Everything changed. I finally said what I knew, and the world decided it was worth listening to.
The book got published. It was a bestseller!
But publication wasn’t the reward. For the first time in decades, my days were no longer optimized for optics or approval, and I don’t care about another person’s opinion.
That indifference is Freedom!
I watched the majesty of creation from the shoreline for hours. The waves slowly roll and crash, their white caps cresting over to cool the hot Hawaiian sand, then surrendering gently into the vast Pacific Ocean. Unlike sales momentum, restricted share units or stock options, this moment cannot be erased, taken away—nor does it ever expire worthless.
It is simply mine.
