The Bridge Between is Sometimes the Destination

Bridges rarely feature in the traveller’s photographs. We focus on the cities they connect, the shores they span. Yet to live between cultures, industries, or belief systems is to dwell upon the bridge itself, feeling the tremors of the footfall across the deck.

I think in the west we all grow up being taught subtly or actually that arrival is the goal—that identity results in a choosing a side and staying there mentality. But moving through Doha’s souqs at noon or through Nairobi’s fintech accelerators at midnight, the inadequacy of singular belonging is evident. My accent softens and sharpens in response to the room; my metaphors alter to match the listener’s myths and social framework. Translation, once a chore, becomes musculature. The bridge trains you to bear tension without snapping.

Bridging is not neutral. You absorb turbulence from both banks. In strategy sessions with venture funds you defend regulation as emancipatory; with regulators you defend disruption as survival. Each side receives these conversations with sideways glances. A bridge cannot choose tides, so it weathers them: the scorching doubt of investors, the bureaucratic frost of policymakers, the storm surge of public cynicism when there is talk of blockchain and inclusion in the same breath.

Yet there is privilege in the vantage. From mid-span you glimpse the pattern beneath events. You see that emerging-market entrepreneurs and Davos statesmen, gym trainers and Jungian analysts, are each articulating the same hunger—to be met in their complexity. You recognise the futility of binaries: tradition versus modernity, capitalism versus consciousness, North versus South. The bridge invites a third position: synthesis.

And so the discomfort becomes discipline. You learn to stand quietly while others rush for positions. You resist the temptation to cement yourself into either shore. You begin to suspect that identity is a dynamic equilibrium, a harmonic rather than a noun.

One evening in Doha I watched the golden hour burnish the arches of the Al-Shaqab arena. Horses canter in circles beneath mirrored roofs, the trainers wear smart watches yet understand bloodlines going back centuries. In that moment the bridge relaxes. It must be understood that being between worlds is not indecision. It is ancestry meeting possibility, the past placing its weight upon the future so the span may hold. We today live in a world where to overdo my metaphor we are pulling up the bridges.

But to bridge is to build, it is to grow and it is to open us up for collaboration as a global species. It is to offer one’s own uncertainty as scaffold for those who will cross after. It is to accept invisibility, trusting that what matters is the flow made possible, not the structure itself. Perhaps, in time, the bridge becomes so woven into the landscape that no one remembers a gap ever existed. That, I tell myself, is worth the strain of standing here.

The writing on this website forms a small part of my wider journey — a lifelong fascination with understanding and exploring how culture, technology, and consciousness shape the world we live in, and a search for evidence that far more connects us than separates us.

Through my work at Tintra Group and The Tintra Foundation, incredible teams are turning that exploration into practice — reimagining finance and development for a multipolar world.