You’ve been on the road a while now, Amsterdam, then Copenhagen, now a month in London. What made you want to take this trip?

I gave myself more time this time, and that changed everything. In Amsterdam I ended up going to the same coffee shop every morning just because I liked how the barista plated the pastries, never really looked at a map after the first two days. Copenhagen was for a shoot with a brand I’ve liked for a while, and once it wrapped I picked up a few things from a bakery near the studio that I used to go to, and just walked around the neighbourhood. I didn’t really have anywhere to be, which felt strange and good. London’s been the longest stretch, a month now, and around the second week I started wondering if it was about time to head home. As the return got closer, the tiredness from all that travelling started catching up with me. Still, I got to spend meaningful time here too, meeting new people and old friends.

When we spoke two years ago, you said uncertainty scared you, but that change happens slowly, through trial. Does that still feel true?

Uncertainty is always there, I think, it never really leaves. There was a day in Copenhagen when I suddenly wasn’t feeling well right before a shoot, my body swelling up, and with something unexpected coming up right beforehand, it almost fell through. A few years ago that would have ruined my whole day. This time I just sat outside with a coffee and let it pass, and within a couple of hours it had sorted itself out. I try not to feed the anxious version of the thought, the one that runs ahead and imagines everything going wrong. The worst case rarely actually happens. And when it does, I’ve noticed I’m better now at just responding to it as it comes instead of bracing for it in advance.

Just as something starts to feel familiar, you seem to move on again. That’s more or less been the shape of your last ten years. Is there a place, or a version of yourself, you’ve wanted to stay in a little longer?

I try to look back as little as possible, generally. It’s a decide-and-don’t-look-back kind of thing for me. So it’s not that I find myself wanting to go back to some earlier moment. But there is one place I keep returning to, because it’s good every single time, an island in Korea called Jeju. Every time I go back to Korea, I end up there within a few days, almost without deciding to. There’s a stretch of coastal road on the east side where I run most mornings, olive trees on one side, the sea on the other, and something about that pace, not fast, not going anywhere in particular, gives me a kind of steadiness I can’t really explain in words. I’ve tried finding a similar route in other places and it’s never quite the same.

If everything you come to love is already passing, what do you hold onto, and what do you let go of?

Even when I want to hold onto something, I try to let it go anyway. I’ve noticed the things I most want to hold onto are usually the ones that don’t do me much good if I actually keep them.

Has something you’d come to think mattered slipped away recently? What was it?

Health, actually. Not in some big medical sense, just small things. I used to run six days a week without thinking about it, and now I notice which mornings my knees ask for a slower pace, or how differently I sleep depending on what I ate the night before. None of that would have registered a few years ago. I think that’s just what changes, quietly, without you deciding it should.