Lately

Everyone is optimizing for longevity now. Biomarkers, protocols, supplements by the handful. I think they're right about prevention — most of what kills people can be seen coming, and measuring it is worth doing.

But I don't think that's the whole of it. If you want a long life and a good one, I believe you need three things.

Something from outside your own field. For me that's the piano. I gave it up to a life with no fixed address, and Leuven is the first address I've had in years.

Something physical that isn't training. Mine is a walk before the day starts, twenty minutes, to put my head back in order.

And the people you love, close enough to see. Mine are scattered from Turkmenistan to Europe to the US, so that one I can't simply have. You have to build a reason for everyone to be in the same place. That's part of why we're planting five hectares of desert.

None of it arrives on its own. It takes a certain privilege — time, money, access, a culture with room for it — and that has to be built on purpose rather than waited for. The company is the main block I'm laying, and I want all three at full size, not in the margins of a week.

In May we cleared the first real hurdle: market validation, product-market fit, and proof that we can build this and deliver it. Daycares want it and we can ship it. That question is closed.

No launch, no confetti, nobody outside the company noticed. It's also the only milestone that decides whether there is a company at all.

What it earns us is the next problem: distribution, repeatable and growing. More daycares, more children covered. The twelve-month goal is to get the flywheel turning, so each year comes easier than the one before it instead of harder.

I traded the piano for this kind of keyboard for exactly this. Children spend most of their waking hours indoors, in air nobody measures. We measure it and we fix it. Most rooms still don't have that, and closing that gap is the next few years of work.

Five hectares beside the Garagum canal, where we started planting in 2022.

Around two thousand trees now, most of them fruit — apricot, peach, plum, apple, cherry, berries, all local varieties — plus others put in purely for shade and for the birds. My father runs it: the irrigation, the pruning, and the yearly accounting of what made it through. Whatever didn't gets replaced, so the land stays fully planted instead of quietly thinning out.

It's working. There are more animals than there were, more birds, more of everything that turns up once there's water and cover.

But the trees are half the point. My nephews and cousins come out through the year, in every season, and what they're picking up there isn't gardening — it's that you can be part of an ecosystem rather than its ruler. That's what I want the place to teach, and it teaches better standing in it than said out loud.

For the older ones it's simpler. Somewhere to put the week down and do something slow, together, with the people they love.

You can follow the site on Restor — satellite imagery, species, the slow green returning frame by frame.

Chet Baker for the late hours — a trumpet that sounds like it's turning something over rather than announcing it, and a voice that barely bothers to project.

This goes on when the day is finished and I'm not. Lights low on the terrace, the hour that's better for reflecting than for deciding. Moonlight music.

Keep it low.

A university town that empties and fills with the semesters, rain that can't make up its mind, and the best quiet cafés in Belgium to think in.

It's also where I decided to set up Airflora, and that part wasn't sentiment.

Talent first. For a city this size the density of international people is almost unreasonable — KU Leuven pulls researchers in from everywhere, and enough of them stay that you can hire for something narrow and actually find the person. The university is the engine behind that, not just a name on a ranking.

Then the ecosystem that grew up around it, which genuinely wants you to try: Start it @KBC on the accelerator side, imec when the work needs more than a laptop, and KU Leuven KICK — with KICK House on Naamsestraat — for the student and spin-off energy coming out of the university. None of it guarantees anything. It removes the friction that makes starting something somewhere else lonely.

The rest is just the city — small enough to cross on foot, half an hour from a major airport, quiet enough to think in. Home base, and now something more settled than that.

El hünäri il gezermiş, aň hünäri Dünýäni!
Sen Watansyz hasap etme gonup-göçen durnany,
Onuň üçin serhet bolmaz, ol dünýäň bendiwany...
Bir-birine gollar beren illere gözüm düşdi.

Gurbannazar Ezizow, from Gözüm düşdi — every stanza closes on that same phrase, my eyes fell upon.

He opens by weighing two kinds of work against each other. The proverb says a craftsman's skill travels the land; he answers that the mind's craft travels the world. Same sentence, two different sizes, and he is not shy about which one he rates higher.

Then the crane, which isn't really about birds. Don't call it homeless for landing and moving on — no border applies to it, it belongs to the world entire. That is the shape of a thought as much as a migration. Nothing you think has papers to show.

And the last line is where he lands: of everything his eye falls on, the thing worth naming is peoples holding out a hand to one another. The mind's work reaches everywhere; what makes it worth having is where it's joined to someone else's. The full poem is on serpay.