I have just finished Chapter 25 of my memoir, The World, Again — a chapter that follows the slow, careful return to life after a season of breaking and mending.

It opens before dawn in Biegonice, in the quiet intimacy of my parents’ kitchen. Tea. Bread. The gentle movement of my mother in the half-dark. A conversation that unfolds without effort, as if time and distance had never intervened. There is laughter, memory, worry, tenderness — and the grounding relief of being fully seen without having to explain oneself.

From that table, the story begins to widen.

There is a winter drive to Košice, where the city lies hushed beneath frost, where wool is bought for future jumpers, where hands are wrapped around hot chocolate in a café, and where the possibility of change is spoken aloud for the first time. Soon after comes the email from CrossWorld, confirming a new role and opening a door that had not yet existed in Kacper’s imagination.

The chapter then carries him outward across continents and emotional landscapes:
to Cape Town, where ocean and mountain restore a sense of scale and belonging;
back to Nairobi, where reunions with his team bring tears, laughter, gratitude, and the deep reassurance of shared survival;
on to New York, where past and future sit quietly together in the night;
and finally to Oxford, where a new professional life takes shape.

In Oxford, Kacper walks streets he once wandered as a young, uncertain boy from Poland, carrying little more than hope and fear. Now he walks them as a professional, calm and grounded, no longer shrinking from the world. His induction at CrossWorld introduces a language of humanitarian work that resonates deeply with his own history: poverty understood as injustice rather than misfortune; gender recognised as a force that shapes every life and opportunity; dignity treated as non-negotiable; partnership valued above charity. His childhood of scarcity and his years with GNI quietly echo through those conversations, giving the work both memory and meaning.

The chapter’s final movement carries him far from Europe, across oceans and histories, to Aceh, Indonesia, still rebuilding two years after the great tsunami. The arrival in Banda Aceh is filled with heat, salt, traffic, prayer, ruins, and renewal — the strange beauty of a city that has learned how to live beside its own loss.

It ends in a guest house that feels almost unreal — gold, chandeliers, fish tanks, pink bedding, earthquake briefings — and in the deep, dreamless sleep of someone who has finally arrived where he is needed.

The World, Again is about commitment.

Commitment to work.
Commitment to people.
Commitment to remaining open to life even after it has been frightening.

This chapter marks the moment when healing becomes movement, when memory becomes responsibility, when the world — slowly, quietly — opens itself again.

And Kacper steps forward.

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.