Some chapters are written with energy.
Some with urgency.
Some with memory.

And then there are chapters that arrive quietly, the way healing does.

I have just finished Chapter 24 of my memoir, “The Season of Mending.”
It may be the most tender chapter I have written so far.

This chapter follows Kacper at a moment when the world finally asks him to stop running.

After years of missions, wars, borders, airports, responsibilities, and carrying other people’s emergencies on his back, Kacper arrives in rural Scotland at a therapeutic retreat called Glenmarch House. The landscape receives him gently — mist, old pines, stone walls, frost, and long silences. Nothing dramatic happens there. And yet, everything begins to change.

“The Season of Mending” is not about heroism.
It is about permission.

Permission to rest.
Permission to feel small.
Permission to admit that even the strongest endurance has its limits.

At Glenmarch, Kacper meets Joy, a therapist whose calm presence and deep patience guide him through the slow work of facing himself. Their conversations do not begin with the recent crisis in Nairobi. They begin with the body. With childhood illness. With growing up in Poland under Martial Law. With shame, scarcity, survival, and the quiet architecture of his parents’ love.

From there the story widens — through London, Denmark, India, Iran, Canada, Iceland, Angola, Afghanistan, Sudan, and the long humanitarian road that shaped his adult life. The chapter becomes a kind of inner map of his entire journey, seen not through achievements but through the emotional costs of carrying too much for too long.

Alongside the therapy, life at Glenmarch unfolds with quiet beauty:

• long walks through frozen woods
• snowfall softening the world
• phone calls with his mother, full of ordinary love
• news of the birth of his niece Frania
• trips to Edinburgh and Glasgow
• shared laughter with Ilona and Mateusz, two young staff members who become unexpected companions on this fragile stretch of the road

One of the most important moments of the chapter comes when Kacper, encouraged by Joy, finally begins to tell his truth to people he loves. He writes to Helga in Iceland. He writes to Camila. Their responses — gentle, patient, unafraid — become the turning point. He is heard. And the world does not withdraw its affection.

By the time he leaves Scotland, five weeks later, nothing is “fixed.”
But something essential has shifted.

He boards a small Ryanair flight from Glasgow to Kraków, heading home to his family, to hold his niece for the first time, to re-enter the world not as a man repaired, but as a man no longer hiding.

This chapter is about the moment when endurance ends —
and repair begins.

It is about discovering that the world, even after everything,
is still wide enough to hold you.