A dolphin doesn’t need a manual to swim.

Last weekend I went to visit someone I had never seen before. For some time we had been corresponding with each other and spoke on the phone a few times. He lives in a remote place in eastern Poland, among valleys and mountains. In a rented, old highlander house, together with ten horses, two dogs, two goats, a pony, two cats, chickens and a rooster.

He is very involved in the life of the local community. For example, he engages in actions aimed at reducing light pollution around nearby houses, for an apparently trivial reason: so that it does not disturb insects trying to build nests in those places. To a “normal” person, such behavior could look detached from reality.

In a way, we were connected by spirituality, although he himself knows nothing about it in the classical sense. He has not read anything, studied anything, listened to podcasts, or practiced any teachings. He simply spent his entire life surrendering to the current of life.

Through Switzerland, France, Paris and Poland, life threw various experiences at him — good and bad. And he did nothing other than accept every change as it was.

There is no fear in him. Instead, there is complete, unshakable trust that life will take care of him. And every time, without fail, life truly did so.

I must admit that I felt jealous. I felt that something was being fulfilled that we all dream of and search for on the path to enlightenment — and that this was not my story. There was frustration inside me and a rush of thoughts that I sometimes could not control. How can one live so carefree? How can one be so “irresponsible” about one’s own future and its planning?

My ego kept trying to launch a frontal attack, looking for mistakes, trying to give lectures about the basics of financial security, the sense of safety resulting from stable income, savings, owning property, possession, planning.

And he did nothing other than constantly repeat that he simply knows that everything will be fine. Today he is here, tomorrow life may throw him thousands of kilometers away, together with the animals. The only thing he is certain of is that it will definitely be okay.

He was visibly full of a sense of his own existence. He worked around his place without planning any results. He runs something like mountain house rentals, a kind of agritourism, but he does not really advertise. His hospitality is animals outside, an old, traditional, raw highlander house — nothing special — but it is he who makes this place special.

He does not do it for money. He attracts to this place people who need exactly such energy.

I am now returning by train from visiting him and my head is spinning from the collision of two worlds. And I already thought that I knew something about the path to enlightenment — until I met someone who truly walks it.

This feeling is for me like the moment when someone has spent their whole life reading a manual on how to swim. They know the theory, understand the movements, know how to breathe, but have never been in the water. And then suddenly they meet a fish or a dolphin — a being that knows no manuals, cannot explain anything, but simply is in its natural element.

And then, for the first time, they truly understand what swimming is.

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