I took an interest in the Eastern Roman Empire almost by accident.
When I travel, I have a habit of wanting to know what happened in a place before I got there: who built it, what they believed, what they left behind. In Ioannina, a quiet lake town in the mountains of Epirus, whose castle is said to go back to Justinian and whose streets once filled with families fleeing Constantinople, I pulled a thread.
Over the next year Byzantium gradually occupied a part of my mind. Then, recently, I found myself in the Byzantine Museum in Athens, standing in front of a pair of shoes.
They were small leather shoes, decorated with gold, made about 1500 years ago. There were grander objects in the museum, objects intended to survive history, but the shoes disturbed me more. Someone had worn them. Someone had chosen their clothes in the morning, noticed what other people wore, perhaps had a favorite pair of shoes and tried not to ruin them. None of this should have been surprising, and yet it was.
History has a habit of flattening the people inside it. We imagine ourselves at the far end of it, looking backward. Then you see someone's shoes.
I left the museum thinking about something else. There was no sensible chain of decisions that had brought me to those shoes. I hadn't gone to Ioannina intending to become interested in Byzantium, and I certainly hadn't become interested in Byzantium so that a year later an ordinary object in Athens could rearrange something in my understanding of history.
Ioannina had simply put a possibility in front of me.
This seems to be something experiences do. They expose us to possibilities. A place, a person, a book, a discipline, a conversation can put something into our field of view that wasn't there before. Not necessarily something important. Usually we have no idea what it is yet.
Some possibilities announce themselves. A job offer is a possibility. Moving to another country is a possibility. We recognize these because they ask something obvious of us: a decision.
Others are inconspicuous. They ask for nothing.
An interest in an empire that begins while wandering around a Greek city. A photography lesson that changes the way light falls across a room. A novel that makes another person slightly easier to understand. An obsession with typefaces that never makes someone a designer, but changes their ability to recognize good typography.
At the time, each of these is just a trip, just a lesson, just a book. Any one of them can redirect a life. Their importance is only visible afterward.
Life offers possibilities more often than it announces them.
Experiences have much longer lives than we give them credit for. We tend to judge them immediately: Was the trip good? Was the course worth the investment? Was the book worth reading? These are reasonable questions, but impatient ones. An experience may finish long before its consequences do.
The patient questions are different. What did this change in me? What can I see now that I couldn't before? What in my life would not exist without it? These take years to answer. Nobody asks them at the airport on the way home.
This is part of an experience's lastingness. Something ends, but leaves behind a new direction in which attention can move.
A possibility, however, does nothing on its own.
It can sit in front of us and expire.
Two people can spend two weeks in the same country and return with entirely different worlds. We can walk through a museum and see objects, through a city and see buildings, through another culture and see only novelty. Attention determines how much of the world gets inside.
Exposure creates the possibility. What happens afterward requires participation. We have to notice something. Become curious about it. Follow it.
Life can offer the possibility. It cannot follow it for us.
Followed possibilities have a peculiar property: they generate more possibilities.
Ioannina gave me Byzantium. Byzantium gave me emperors, cities, architecture, theology, wars, objects, books. Those things changed what I noticed when I travelled elsewhere. They changed what I wanted to read, what I stopped in front of in museums, the questions I knew how to ask.
One possibility exposed me to others that I could not have chosen before, because from where I had been standing, they were not yet visible.
This is how possibility compounds.
Learning changes the surface of future attention. A new discipline makes details visible that once disappeared into the background. A new interest makes certain conversations possible. A place changes what we notice in the next place.
Taste, judgment, intuition and imagination are assembled this way. From things we have seen, people we have known, places we have inhabited, books we half remember, mistakes, conversations, objects, music, disciplines that once seemed irrelevant. Eventually the sources become impossible to separate from one another. They become the library from which we think.
What remains is simply the person.
There is a difference, then, between going deeper into a world and making the world larger.
We have become extraordinarily good at the first. The feeds surely know that Justinian is my favorite Roman Emperor now. They can show me obscure documentaries I would never have pressed play on otherwise. LLMs make the possibilities stranger still. Given a thread, there is almost no limit to how far it can be followed.
But I still need the original prompt.
This is the strange limit hidden inside almost unlimited access to information. Search begins with a query. Recommendation begins with a preference. Both are remarkably good at taking us farther in directions we already face.
But you cannot search for something you don't know to look for. You cannot become fascinated by a subject that has never entered your world. You cannot plan the conversation that will change a conviction you don't yet know is fragile.
Byzantium existed before Ioannina. Every book was already there. The museum was there. Justinian had been dead for fourteen centuries. In some objective sense, the possibility had always existed.
It simply didn't exist for me yet.
Something had to bring it into my world.
This is why a highly optimized life contains a subtle risk. Optimization asks what is best according to what we value now: the restaurant most likely to please us, the music closest to our taste, the itinerary suited to our interests. There is enormous value in this.
But relevance can only be calculated from who we already are.
The person we might become is harder to optimize for. There is no data on them yet.
There is value in remaining permeable to things that have not yet earned their relevance. Not some romantic rejection of planning. A life without structure becomes merely chaotic. But there is a difference between choosing a direction and demanding the outcome, between having intentions and filling every available space with them.
Certain ways of living seem to expose us to more possibilities. An unfamiliar place. A new discipline. A friendship outside one's usual world. A book chosen for reasons that are difficult to defend. A conversation with someone we might ordinarily have walked past.
None guarantees anything.
Most possibilities will disappear without consequence. Some we won't notice. Others we will notice and decide not to follow.
But occasionally one catches our attention. We follow it. It leads to another, and another.
The world becomes larger.
Not because the world contains more things than it did before, but because more of it has become capable of meaning something to us.
I think again about those ancient leather shoes, adorned with gold. Whoever made them could not have imagined the museum, the glass case, or the stranger who would one day stand on the other side of it and suddenly feel that history had become less distant.
The life of that object continued far beyond the life for which it was made.
Experiences do something similar inside us. They disappear into the library, alter what we notice, expose us to possibilities, and quietly participate in what we become.
We naturally want to control the shape of our lives. We make plans, choose directions, try to know what comes next. Control brings comfort.
But there is another kind of comfort: knowing that some of the best things that will ever happen to us begin as inconspicuous possibilities.
There are good things coming that we cannot yet imagine.