Somewhere around the middle of a 21-hour bus ride through Western Sahara, I found myself staring at a lake that didn’t exist.
I’d boarded the bus in Agadir, Morocco, headed south toward Dakhla. Twenty-one hours is an impressive amount of time to spend sitting in one position, particularly when the scenery consists largely of sand, more sand, and the occasional reminder that there’s an extraordinary amount of sand on this planet.
But I’ve always enjoyed traveling overland. There’s something about watching the landscape change gradually that makes a journey feel more tangible. You begin to appreciate the distance between places, the people moving through them, and the little pockets of life that rarely make it into a travel guide.
You also have a tremendous amount of time to think, which, depending on the day, can be either enlightening or a terrible idea.
A lake in the middle of nowhere
I was sitting near the front of the bus, occasionally chatting with the driver as we continued south. The landscape had become increasingly barren, stretching toward the horizon in every direction. After enough hours, the desert starts playing tricks on your sense of distance. Everything looks simultaneously close and impossibly far away.
At one point, the driver gestured toward something in the distance. I looked ahead and saw what appeared to be a large body of water sitting in the middle of the desert.
It wasn’t a subtle illusion. The surface appeared to shimmer beneath the sun, reflecting the sky in a way that made it look remarkably convincing. I’d heard about desert mirages, of course, but knowing they exist and watching one appear in front of you are entirely different experiences.
For a few minutes, I genuinely believed there was a lake ahead of us.
We kept driving, and the water seemed to retreat. As we got closer to where it should have been, the illusion gradually disappeared, leaving nothing but the same dry landscape we’d been looking at for hours.
No lake. No oasis. Not even a particularly interesting puddle.
Just the desert doing what the desert does.
I remember being fascinated by how convincingly my brain had accepted something that wasn’t there. I hadn’t simply imagined the water. I’d seen it, interpreted it, and accepted it as reality, all before discovering that my eyes had been playing tricks on me.
And with roughly half a day of sitting still ahead of me, I had plenty of time to think about that.
The stories we make up
I’ve always been interested in how much of our experience is shaped by perception. Two people can walk into the same room, have the same conversation, and leave with completely different understandings of what happened.
The mirage reminded me of something I’d been noticing in my own life: how easily we invent stories about what other people think of us.
Someone doesn’t respond to a message, and we assume they’re upset. A person seems distracted during a conversation, and we decide we’ve said something wrong. Someone questions an idea, and suddenly we’re convinced they think we’re incompetent.
We take a tiny piece of information, construct an entire explanation around it, and begin responding emotionally to a story that may have absolutely nothing to do with reality.
I’m certainly guilty of this. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit worrying about what someone might think of a decision, a career move, or a direction I wanted to take in life, only to discover that the person in question had barely given it a second thought.
Occasionally, they hadn’t even noticed.
Which is both humbling and rather liberating.
The funny part is how convincing our own assumptions can become. Just as I’d looked at the horizon and accepted that there was water ahead, we look at someone’s expression, a brief interaction, or an unanswered message and confidently decide we know what it means.
The story feels real because we’ve spent so much time thinking about it. But thinking about something doesn’t make it true.
Sometimes the lake simply isn’t there.
The freedom of being a little less concerned
Traveling independently has helped me become more comfortable with the possibility of looking foolish.
It’s difficult to spend years navigating unfamiliar countries without occasionally misunderstanding something, making a questionable decision, or finding yourself in a situation where everyone else seems to understand what’s happening except you.
You mispronounce a word. You get on the wrong bus. You make an incorrect assumption about a local custom. At some point, you realize that being embarrassed is a relatively small price to pay for experiencing the world.
And if you’re fortunate, you develop a sense of humor about it.
I think the same principle applies to how we navigate our lives outside of travel. So much of what we hesitate to pursue has less to do with whether we genuinely want it and more to do with how we imagine other people might perceive it.
We become remarkably skilled at explaining ourselves before anyone has asked for an explanation.
I can look back at decisions I’ve made that probably seemed unusual from the outside. Leaving familiar surroundings to teach English in Thailand, spending years exploring different countries, changing careers, or eventually taking the rather substantial risk of building a business.
Not every decision worked out beautifully, and some came with consequences I hadn’t anticipated. But I also know that if I’d waited until every choice made perfect sense to everyone around me, I would have missed some of the most meaningful experiences of my life.
Of course, that doesn’t mean other people’s perspectives are irrelevant. There’s enormous value in listening to people who know you well, particularly when they’re willing to challenge an idea you may be romanticizing.
The distinction, I’ve found, is between considering someone’s actual perspective and allowing an imagined version of their judgment to make decisions on your behalf.
One can be useful. The other can keep you standing still for a very long time.
Getting older doesn’t make you immune
I’d like to tell you that the years since that bus journey have made me completely indifferent to what other people think.
Unfortunately, I remain human.
I still catch myself replaying conversations, overthinking decisions, or wondering whether something I’ve shared will be misunderstood. The difference is that I’m a little quicker to recognize when I’m creating an entire narrative without much evidence.
And I’ve become more comfortable with the fact that I won’t always be understood.
As life evolves, so do the expectations people attach to you. You’re a traveler, then a salesperson, then a business owner, and suddenly there are all sorts of opinions about what someone in your position should or shouldn’t be doing.
You can spend an extraordinary amount of energy trying to make every part of your life fit neatly into other people’s expectations.
Or you can accept that you’re allowed to change, explore new interests, make mistakes, and occasionally surprise yourself.
I’m increasingly drawn to the latter.
There’s something wonderfully freeing about realizing you don’t need to be particularly easy to explain. You can be ambitious and curious, serious about your work and completely unserious about certain parts of life. You can build something meaningful while still wanting to disappear into the mountains for a few weeks.
And you don’t necessarily owe everyone a convincing explanation for why those things belong together.
Twenty-one hours well spent
Eventually, the bus arrived in Dakhla, and my journey south continued toward Mauritania. By then, I’d spent nearly an entire day watching the desert pass by, occasionally shifting in my seat, and developing a newfound appreciation for the possibility of standing up.
But that mirage stuck with me.
Not because it revealed some extraordinary secret about human consciousness, or because one afternoon in the Sahara suddenly cured me of insecurity. I’d be giving a bus ride far too much credit.
It stayed with me because it was such a simple, tangible reminder of how confidently we can believe something that turns out not to be true.
We spend so much of our lives interpreting the world through assumptions, expectations, and stories we’ve constructed about ourselves and other people. Sometimes those stories are useful. Sometimes they’re wildly inaccurate. And occasionally, we become so attached to them that we forget to question whether there’s anything behind them at all.
I’ve learned to be a little more suspicious of the imaginary lakes.
Especially the ones involving what everybody else supposedly thinks of me.
As for the actual lake in Western Sahara, I’m still mildly disappointed it wasn’t real. After that many hours on a bus, a swim would have been rather nice.
