Me

of her projects. Listening to music with my mother. Thinking back on those simple times that were so happy, I realized what I needed was to go back to the beginning. I had to go back to being a little boy.
    I started to practice martial arts, and within six months I became a bit obsessive: For breakfast, lunch, and dinner I lived and breathed capoeira, a martial art from Brazil. It combines the elements of music, play, battle, and dance. It was like being a kid again. I went to a capoeira academy where people from ages eighteen to forty practiced. But when we were training, we all turned into kids.
    I also set aside some time to travel. Along with some friends, I traveled across the United States in an RV. Of course, we could have done the trip in a high-end luxury tour bus, with a chauffeur and every amenity imaginable. But I said no. I didn’t want that. First of all, I wanted to drive. And I didn’t want to have anything around that reminded me of my work. If I had decided to travel on a big beautiful bus, I’d again be reminded of the crazy tours and having to rush from concert to concert.
    In fact, what I wanted most was simplicity. When we stopped, it was not to find a fancy hotel, but instead to look for a campsite, and that’s where we would stay until it was time to get back on the road. We would drive in shifts. One day we were driving through a small town in Texas and I was at the wheel. Apparently, I had exceeded the speed limit and a policeman stopped me.
    “Was I really going over the speed limit?” I asked him. “In this big thing?”
    “Well, yes,” the policeman replied. “You were going thirty-five miles an hour in a thirty-mile zone.”
    I gave him my driver’s license, and when he looked at it he couldn’t believe his eyes.
    “Huh?” he said. “Ricky Martin? Here?”
    “Yes,” I said, resisting the urge to laugh.
    “But what could Ricky Martin possibly be doing in this little town?”
    We spoke for a while, I told him about my vacation, and I asked him how to get to a motel. Later that evening I cracked up just thinking of how his family and friends at the police station would probably not believe him when he told them the story.
    And that’s how the whole trip went. From one town to the next, without any luxuries or fanfare. I went with one group of friends, and along the way we met up with other groups of friends who lived in the various cities we passed through.
    I traveled through the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Vail, Aspen, and the Mojave Desert. I went where I wanted and did what I wanted, with very little planning. I enjoyed the whole thing very much.
    For the first time in a long time I felt completely free, powerful, able to do whatever I wanted, regardless of what anyone said or thought of me. I had spent so much time only thinking about work, about what was expected of me and what I had to do each day that I had forgotten what it was like to wake up in the morning without a fixed plan.
    I also went to Asia a few times. I went to India on a trip that would change my life. I came back. I spent some time in New York and later went to Brazil in search of new sounds. I went to Egypt with a few friends, always trying to remain anonymous. I’d wear a hat, and when we arrived at the hotel, one of my friends would check me in and I would go straight to my room. Every day I would go out and people would look at me, saying, “Could it be him? No. It can’t be. . . . But it sure does look like him.”
    One day in Egypt, we hired a guide to take us to the historical and tourist sites and explain to us what we were seeing. As we walked around she would look at me from the corner of her eye, but during the entire tour she didn’t dare say a word. At the end of the afternoon she couldn’t resist any longer and she asked, “Excuse me, sir. Are you Ricky Martin?”
    Yes, I am. But not the one you know.
    Now I am Kiki, nice to meet you.
    Things were changing. Now I felt the need to dedicate as much time as possible to the little boy within me. I felt that I had to disappear for a little while and go deep inside to connect with my truest emotions, my deepest sense of self. I fell in and out of love, and I allowed myself to fully live through these relationships. With more calm and less fear, with less blame and more acceptance. I learned to love myself again and to be the spontaneous and joyful boy I used to be.

THE JOY OF SILENCE
    THE FIRST THING I did when I returned to work was