Scale

By our count, there are at least eight bakeries on Patmos. Like the tavernas here, each has its distinguishing specialties around a core set of items that are the same. The average price per item is 2 to 3 euros, while a fresh, delicious load of bread is often a shockingly cheap 1.20. The packaged, processed, shelf-stable bread at the supermarket isn't cheaper – much the opposite from home. In France, I discovered table wine was cheaper than bottled water. In Greece – or at least Patmos – bread is cheaper than table water which averages 1.50 for a 1.5 liter bottle.

The economics of Patmos sometimes confuse me. How are there enough people, buying enough cheap bread, cheap desserts and cheese or spinach pies each day to comfortably support eight bakeries on a small island? The margins can't be great so even if the four or five bakeries that make bread each sold 100 loaves a day (which seems high from what I've seen), it's not that much money, especially when you factor the overhead, the beautifully custom printed bakery boxes, napkins and bags each one gives out like candy and the employees who are there from early morning until late at night. At home, bakeries have become far fewer than when I was a child because they are so hard to sustain when threatened by supermarkets – and today those bakeries that exist tend to offer smaller quantities of upscale specialty items or serve higher ticket meals like sandwiches and salads. American bakeries cannot live on bread alone.

From everything I can tell, many of the businesses on Patmos appear at first glance to make more money than they probably do. There are tons of car rentals – but if you consider that they really only operate for three or four months a year, it probably takes three years to make back the cost of a new car and the real profits are made in subsequent years. So each car has maybe five to seven good earning years, bringing in perhaps $3,000 to $4,000 per summer. It takes a lot of capital to get into the game and if you're a big operator here, you might have 10 to 15 cars. For all the costs and all the work, the profits are not amazing – maybe enough to live comfortably on an island like Patmos, especially if you own your property outright, which I imagine most of the families here do since it gets handed down from generation to generation.

If I had to guess, property is the real cash cow of the Patmosian system since renting out hotel rooms, studios and houses would have the highest revenue yield with the highest margins. Our friend Nichola and his family rent out 15 studios near Skala at 60-70 euros a night in the peak of summer. While they may have vacancies toward the beginning and end of the summer, they have always seemed mostly full – and in four months, it's easy to see how they make a comfortable living. We also happen to know that Nichola and family have several properties around the island including their main family house in Skala, another guesthouse and one of the island's most popular restaurants (which he rarely mentions they own). Looking at anyone on Patmos, you would never know who does well and who doesn't – people with money seem to dress and live as simply as anyone here.

I think about these things because scale often confuses me in life. Why does the population density in Israel – a country of almost 9 million feel not considerably different than Greece's 10 million people spread across six times the area? How is it possible to get enough gasoline every day to every single gas station in every piddly location in the world? How can you have two Starbucks across the street from each other? How do the 5.6 million people of Singapore living within 279 square miles sustain 103 shopping malls while the 10.1 million people in Los Angeles County spread out across 4,751 square miles support 32 malls?

There are of course reasons for all of it and there's an expert for everything – but scale when you get into numbers of millions and geographic spans of thousands of miles seem hard to fully comprehend. As Professor of History Noah Yuval Harari says in one of his three recent INCREDIBLE books 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, the scale and intricacy of the systems that comprise our world and how it works cannot – and are not – understood by any individual. How many of us know exactly where our food comes from let alone exactly what we're eating? How many can account for and explain ALL the factors that go into the behavior of the stock market? How the Internet works? How our electricity is generated and delivered to us? How international sanctions go into effect? How a zipper works? What your shoes are made of? Some of the most mundane and everyday things that we rely on, which we discuss are beyond the ability of most of us to truly explain because – as Harari puts it – we live in an intricate web interconnecting people and things far beyond each of our scope of awareness. 

What's even harder to comprehend is the scale of time. Because both that we have visited it consistently and the particular intervals (after getting married, with a 15 month-old and another five years later with two kids) at which we have come, Patmos has become one of those places that marks time for Emily and me. 

"When we first came, I looked at the families with young kids and they were old to me. Now, we're talking to those people, we're getting to know those people. How did WE get to be THOSE people?!" Emily said last night at dinner?

"Well, it's been nine years – those people were about 10 years older than us. And we've had children. Now we're them." I said.

"We're 41 – that's old. I don't feel old. Do we seem as old as them? But 41 is still young, right?"

Emily went on, struggling with a variety of fragmented thoughts about age and time – and where she and we fit in the timeline of a human life. It has to be one of the most difficult things for anyone to really wrap their heads around since time is a very tricky and often elusive concept. What the clock and calendar say vs how we experience life and how everyone experiences each other – it just doesn't all fit together cleanly and cohesively. Maybe our mind aren't made to understand it?

I know people including my sister and my cousin Jacob who really struggle with age, time and experience existential crisis with the passing of markers and milestones such as birthdays. Trying to triangulate their position in the timeline of life and measure themselves against their goals, desires and self images is a major and somber process. Others, like Emily, look up every now and then and wonder how they got to where they are – because it seems like last week they were 22 and living free and crazy. How did that person who cranked the car stereo, partied and spent unlimited amounts of unstructured time with a large circle of friends find herself saying, "Sweetie, you can't sing about peeing in the ocean when other people are around…" and "Ok, it will be your turn to sit in the middle seat this time and then next time, your sister gets to sit in the middle seat, so please stop complaining!"

And when a student turns in a paper that says, "It's understandable that at 40, a woman doesn't want to have sex anymore and maybe she can find her romantic pleasure through gardening," it might trigger an existential moment.

For me, time and my place in it feels different than for many people I know. It seems like we're on a path and to use the old cliche, "wherever you go, there you are." So I sort of play on another cliche, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life!" Or more accurately, today and this age can be the best yet. It's clearly not going to be what I've experienced before, but can't it be great in its own right? Besides, there are lots of times when I was younger that I really enjoyed and would NEVER go back to. For all the freedom and opportunity my 20's offered me, there were a lot of times when the ground felt shaky and I didn't know how to navigate the pitfalls I faced. I made mistakes I grimace at today. Although I also could give more of my time, attention and heart to people and activities I loved. That's the thing about the ties that bind. On the other hand, those same ties bind us to family, community and keep us from floating about aimlessly. I am less free, but more grounded. I have more power and less serendipity. The wonderful and at times suffocating part is that people need me – and I am responsible to them. But I would have it no other way.

I suppose sitting on Patmos with my family, it's not the most difficult thing to write that this is the best time of my life. They can't all be this. But I also hope that this isn't the best time ever. Or that any other time before was.

"Look over there, those people – they're what, early to mid-sixties?" Emily pointed to a table nearby. "Are we going to be in Patmos and be THEM in 20 years?!!!"

"I certainly hope so!" I responded.

In 20 years, we will be far from the newly married Emily and Eric who set foot on Patmos with wide eyes nor the 41 year-olds with the cute, young kids spending long, summer days at the beaches and outdoor restaurants. We'll look like more like those three, gray haired French couples at the next table and as Emily fears, the Emily and Eric of nine years ago and of today would be unlikely to reach out to us. We'll be in a different demographic and the 41 year-olds who seemed old before will seem young and outside our circle. We will be distinctly less young than now. Our kids will likely be leading their own lives, and certainly not cuddling in the mornings or making up songs thanking Apollo for the sunset over the beach. And 20 years probably isn't as long as we would like it to be. Emily's fear that we're getting older is well founded – it's coming for us.

But is it bad?

If in 20 years, we feel good about how our children are doing in the world and on a warm, clear summer night we're sitting at a table with gray-haired friends enjoying some wine and mezzes at a restaurant overlooking Grikos Bay and Petra Beach in Patmos – I could be very satisfied with being "old". I imagine and hope that will be the best time to yet unfold in our lives.