The Man Who Was Afraid of Everything (Except His Cat)
Hendra Wijaya was, by all external metrics, a perfectly fine forty-three-year-old Chinese Indonesian man. He had a decent condo in Pantai Indah Kapuk, a car that started on the first try, and a small collection of houseplants that were mostly still green. But inside Hendra’s skull, it was a 24/7 disaster movie marathon, complete with a loud, sweaty narrator who only whispered the word “but.”
Every choice Hendra faced came with a glossy brochure of what could go wrong.
Invest in that friend’s coffee shop? Sure, until a beanie-wearing barista accidentally sets the roaster on fire, the health inspector finds a rat king in the basement, and Hendra loses his life savings. So he kept his money in a savings account earning 0.01% interest, which he checked daily for signs of bank failure.
Relationship? He met a lovely woman named Priya who laughed at his jokes. But within hours, his brain had constructed a fifteen-slide PowerPoint on how she’d eventually leave him for a guy named Chandra who does CrossFit and owns a boat. So Hendra stayed home, where the only rejection came from his cat, Mochi, who was already judging him from atop the refrigerator.
Business? He had an idea for an app that helped people find lost socks. Brilliant. Then he imagined the liability lawsuits (“This app made me lose my other sock!”), the server crashes, the angry Reddit threads. He never wrote a single line of code.
Instead, Hendra became a connoisseur of the “path of less risk.” Which is a fancy way of saying he did nothing remarkable for fifteen years. Every slight bad news—a stock market dip, a friend’s divorce, a mildly concerning weather forecast—sent his pulse into the triple digits. He’d frantically rearrange his sock drawer or reorganize his spice rack by color (sweet soy sauce to the left, chili sauce to the right), because short-term chaos gave him a tiny, pathetic hit of control.
Long-term projects? Hilarious. He once tried to grow tomatoes from seed. On day three, he read about tomato blight and immediately dug up the entire pot, sobbing into a bag of organic compost while Mochi watched like a tiny, furry HR representative.
One Thursday, after a minor work email (“Your quarterly review has been rescheduled”) triggered a two-hour panic attack involving him lying on the kitchen floor while Mochi stared at him with the exact expression his late grandmother used to make—“What is wrong with you, child?”—Hendra admitted defeat. He Googled “how to stop my brain from exploding” and signed up for a weekend meditation retreat called “Silence & Sanity (Mostly Silence).”
The retreat was held in a converted barn in Puncak that smelled of lavender and other people’s repressed emotions. The mentor, a bald woman named Sari who wore beige like it was a personality, had a voice so calm it made Hendra want to scream.
“Just sit,” Sari said. “Be aware of the feeling. Don’t fight it. Understand its shape.”
Hendra sat. For the first hour, his brain was a hyperactive toddler on pure palm sugar. What if the roof collapses? What if I forget how to breathe? What if Mochi is plotting against me? (That last one felt valid.)
By hour two, he wanted to run. His legs had fallen asleep, and his anxiety had morphed into a solid, greasy lump in his chest. He remembered every bad choice he hadn’t made. The coffee shop. Priya. The sock app. The tomatoes.
Just get up, his brain hissed. Check your phone. Rearrange the barn’s throw pillows. Eat some crackers. Do something!
But he persisted. He stared at the feeling. And then, like a magician pulling a sweaty rabbit out of a hat, he saw it.
He was clingy. Not to people—to conditions. He needed money to be safe. He needed prestige to be certain. He needed his performance to be perfect. But those things were like trying to hold smoke. Markets crash. People leave. Tomatoes get blight.
And then, a forgotten memory bubbled up. He was seventeen, eating instant noodles in his parents’ living room in Glodok, watching an old interview with Bruce Lee on YouTube. Bruce had been talking about water.
“Empty your mind,” Bruce had said, his voice a playful ripple. “Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Back then, Hendra thought it was a cool line for a poster. Now, sitting cross-legged on a scratchy cushion, it hit him like a dumbbell wrapped in a gentle hug.
Water doesn’t freak out about the crack in the cup, Hendra thought. Water just fills the damn crack.
He realized: acceptance wasn’t defeat. It was the ultimate unlock. If he stopped demanding that life be a smooth, predictable, low-risk sidewalk, he could finally improvise. The worst event happening didn’t have to be the end of the story. It could just be… a plot twist. A chance to reshape, to flow around, to give the next moment a completely different meaning.
A calm spread through his chest like warm ginger tea. His breath, for the first time in a decade, went from panicking hamster to slow, reliable motorcycle taxi engine.
He opened his eyes. Sari was smiling.
“See anything interesting?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Hendra whispered. “I think I’ve been trying to be a brick wall. But I’m actually supposed to be a puddle.”
Later that night, he called Priya. Not to propose or confess his love. Just to say, “Hey, I’ve been a weird, anxious hermit. Want to get coffee? If it’s terrible, we can leave. If you hate me, I’ll survive. Probably.”
She laughed. “Okay. But if you bring a risk-assessment flowchart, I’m ordering the most expensive fried banana.”
He didn’t bring a flowchart. The coffee was good. The conversation was better. And when he got home, he bought a single tomato seedling.
It might get blight. But for now, he watered it, watched it lean toward the sun, and thought: I’ll figure it out when I get there.
And for a guy whose brain had once seen a sneeze as a harbinger of the apocalypse, that felt like flying.