What Remains When the Mirage Breaks
What Remains When the Mirage Breaks
Sahara Dessert, Morocco, 2026
I have always been drawn to the desert. I cannot fully explain it. There is something about it being so mysterious, its vastness, the endless horizon, the emptiness, its harshness - all characteristics symbolise lots of extremes - not just the blacks and the whites, and the also the in between.
My first desert was way back in 2000. I was backpacking in Rajasthan, northwest India, riding out from Jaisalmer fort city into the Thar Desert on a camel safari: 2 guides, 2 camels, and me! In mid-day when the sun got too scorchingly hot, we'd find some rare trees for shades and rest. At night I slept in a sleeping bag under a massive sky full of stars. I'd wake up with sand IN my mouth, completely dried out, uncomfortable, a bit disoriented. It was rough, but I loved it.
Thar Desert, India, 2000 : Desert safari with 2 camels, 2 guides, and me
Then 2022, my first trip after the pandemic. I went to the Sahara desert in Egypt. This time I went with a 4-by-4s and a skilled driver who knew where to turn on the endless sands with no roads or road signs! I met the Bedouins: the resilient, quiet, and intelligent tribe who just live out there, and it stayed with me. This trip was a lot of human connection. And then, I saw a mirage for the first time in real life! In my teen years I read pretty much every book in the Wesley novel series 卫斯理系列, from a wildly imaginative Hong Kong sci fi and adventure writer. The desert showed up constantly in his books, always as a place of mystery and illusion. From the Wesley novels, the idea of the mirage, 海市蜃楼, always stay with me. It is so rare to see, so mysterious. It is something that looks completely real from afar, until you get close enough to realise it was never there at all. It’s real, but not in some place that we can reach directly.
Sahara Desert, Egypt, 2022 : Our tent base - it was just us in the vast desert.
Then recently, I went to the far end of the same Sahara I'd been to in Egypt - to the Erg Chebbi in Morocco. This time just one night, in a luxury camp in the desert. Comfortable. Curated. Almost too easy. Early morning, I found myself alone in quiet times just admiring the vastness of the desert, pondering what the desert teaches me: if I’m left with no curated luxury in the desert, with no noise, no support, what essentials takeover? Water matters. Shade matters. Energy matters. The basics. Everything else becomes secondary.
I keep thinking about this against everything going on in the world right now, the conflict and human suffering across Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, Ukraine, Myanmar,….. places where people's lives have been stripped down, just because circumstance forced it on them.
It makes me reflect on the fundamental nature of existence. Maybe at the most basic level, life is just about survival. Strip away the systems, the ambitions, the structures, and we're all just trying to get through, one day at a time.
But in the desert, survival is not the only thing that exists. There is awareness. There is choice. There is a quiet discipline in how you move, how you conserve energy, how you respond to what is around you. You cannot control the desert. But you are not powerless within it.
What do I hold on to when things do not go as planned? What do I return to when certainty disappears? What matters enough to stay even when everything else falls away?
I am still sitting with these questions. Still in stages of self-doubt, still learning how to fully relate to what the desert keeps showing me. But here is what I am starting to understand: The desert does not teach you how to have more. It teaches you how to live with less, without losing yourself.
In my work as a coach and in people development, I see this pattern everywhere. We build careers, teams, projects, identities. Complex structures that give us meaning and security. And then something shifts. A restructure. A market change. A personal loss. A global crisis. Suddenly, the mirage dissolves. What looked solid from a distance turns out to be just sand and light.
And what remains? Not the title. Not the plan. Not the carefully constructed version of ourselves we present to the world. What survives is who we are when everything unnecessary is stripped away.
That’s what the deserts and the mirage teach me: Beneath the comfort, beneath the experience, beneath the story I might tell others, there is always a more basic truth. Life will, in different ways, strip things away from us. Sometimes slowly. Sometimes all at once.
When that happens, we do not survive because of what we owned, achieved, or planned. We survive because of how we have learned to be.
Author: Susan Fong | August 2026
