The last five years of my dental career were the most successful and the most indifferent. I had learned that a dentist in Germany survived only by ignoring half the rules. Anyone who obeyed every regulation started the day with forms and perhaps reached a few teeth by late afternoon.
I stopped fighting the system. I fulfilled its demands on the surface: signatures, complete documentation, hygiene protocols. I knew that much of it had little to do with medicine. It was armour, an administrative survival strategy.
The turning point was a patient who refused to pay because he claimed I had not warned him sufficiently about an almost unimaginable theoretical risk. The legal argument was absurd but revealing. Information was no longer a basis of trust; it could be used as a weapon. From then on everyone received a form. The conversation became shorter, the paper trail longer, and inwardly I had already left.
Those years earned me enough money to escape. I understood the game and could finish it calmly. Even the threat of professional sanctions had lost its force because I had already said goodbye inside.
Once I had a chance to leave on a grand scale. A wealthy Russian family offered me a clinic in Dubai. Rooms, capital and concept were ready. I placed an advertisement and three hundred German dentists applied. Three hundred colleagues had reached the same inner point: exhausted, controlled and not yet free.
I could have jumped. At fifty-five I might have become rich in the sun. I stayed because my father’s practice was responsibility and foundation. Perhaps that was wisdom, perhaps cowardice, probably both.
Sometimes I mourn the missed chance, not for the money but because I could have let go sooner. Dubai might have freed me faster, but not better. More zeros in the bank would not necessarily have brought more meaning.
Today I live freely, but freedom is not without cost. I sometimes miss people with new ideas, young minds behind glass with laptops, imagination and espresso. Here among olives and wind life is real and grounded, but also closed. There are fewer accidental encounters, fewer projects that make one believe the world may reinvent itself once more.
That is the price of freedom: it gives peace and removes some of the friction that once kept us awake. Solar panels, water pumps and kilometres of cable were difficult, but solvable. The encounter with completion is harder. When everything works, silence remains.
I worked so long toward this state that I sometimes do not know what to do with it. Perhaps this is the price of success: nothing contradicts us anymore. The sadness is not despair, only a quiet longing for people who understand that perfection can become lonely.
Maybe one of them will read this and write. Not to console, but to share.
