1. To dance at the edge of the unknown

At the age of 7, I suddenly realized that death was irreversible, and it totally freaked me out. This came as a sudden insight that life is a one-way street, and once it's gone, it's gone. I was screaming and screaming. A visitor in the house came up the steps and asked me why I was screaming. I said, "Because I suddenly realized that death is the end, and I don't want to die." She said, "Oh well, you're seeing it now, but when you're an adult, you won't pay attention to it anymore. You'll get used to the fact, and it won't disturb you anymore." I stopped crying and said, "Really?" Then I started to cry again and said, "I don't want to be an adult. I don't want to be an adult." Instead of saying, "I don't want to die," it changed to "I don't want to be an adult." It was more of a problem to be an adult and go through the motions of a normative society, orthodoxy, and so on, in order not to think about these real things, like death. That was scarier for me than death itself!
Let me move to around 1967 when at the age of 21, a group of 5 of us from Oxford including my girlfriend at the time hitchhiked with our aim to India. Going off from London and hitchhiking down, getting a boat across, on a train to Istanbul and then hitchhiked all the way. Though we didn't get to India, we reached up to Lahore, Pakistan, it was an amazing, amazing adventure.
On our way, we stopped in this minimal border station at the Turkey-Iran crossing. A sleepy border guard where nobody is going through, half the night chatted with my girlfriend and me. We couldn't hitchhike together, since the five of us usually couldn't fit into one car, so we kept meeting at different spots along the way. I asked the guard if he played chess, he said sure, and I'd love to play chess. Let's play chess, I said, yeah, let's do it. I proposed that if I won, he would arrange a good ride for us... I won, and after a couple of hours, a Porsche arrived, driven by a French playboy looking person. The guard noticed the driver had a pistol in his bag and said you're not allowed to come through because you don't have a pistol license. “Yes, I do, here, it is”, showed the Frenchmen a French license. He said it doesn't mean anything to me, this license, can't understand it, it’s in French. Look, I'll let you through, but you take these people and take them to Tehran.