So, we did.

Each morning, before the first adzan call, my daughter and I found ourselves out in the streets. Some days were spent in our gym, grinding through difficult workouts. Others were gentler, long walks with our five large dogs along dimly lit roads, streetlights flickering through the mist. Those hours became our time.

To fill them, aside from my ever-present speaker cycling between news, politics and business podcasts, with a healthy mix of country music for balance, we talked about everything.

Sometimes the topics were light: pop culture and stories about the dogs. More often, our conversations stretched into questions that never fit neatly into one sunrise. My daughter, a bit of a policy enthusiast like her father, wrestled with questions about the city, the nation and the world beyond it.

Unlike me, a grateful guest who has called Indonesia home for more than two decades, her view was more complex. My love for this country is rooted in admiration and respect. Hers is braided from two worlds, one anchored in the emerging Global South, empathetic to its struggles, the other tied to the structured certainty the West once promised, but now seems to question itself.

As we walked those streets, Jakarta’s story and hers began to merge.

Her goals evolved to reflect a motivation that runs deeper. What began as early-morning training sessions turned into a series of challenges, ranging from national powerlifting meets where she set multiple Indonesian records to competing in running events. From there, she aimed to blend strength and stamina in today’s premier global fitness competition, HYROX, becoming the only Indonesian teen ever to attempt completion of the Individual Pro-Level Division on the international stage. Each step built toward a larger dream: admission to the United States Military Academy.

It would be easy to assume that this dream reflected a desire to leave Indonesia. It does not. After thousands of hours of conversation, I know better. Her motivation runs deeper.

It stems from a conviction, rare in youth, that the order and stability once provided by the US-led security system mattered, and may now be most in question at the very moment it matters most. The same sea lanes that opened trade and lifted billions from poverty are now threatened by fragmentation, unpredictability and environmental strain.

With a father who is part jailhouse lawyer, part policy analyst and part survivalist, she has learned to question more than she accepts. Rather than picking sides or passing judgment, our long, sweat-drenched dawn debates always came back to one thing: how to make things a little better. Not just for one country or another, but for a world that shares the same spinning globe, where the problems that divide us rarely stop at borders.

It was not the workouts that gave me the most hope. It was the morning she returned from Taiwan carrying an award from Model United Nations, Best Delegate of the G20. That recognition, earned for her ability to build bridges between opposing views, said more about her than any medal on a barbell ever could.

In her, I see something the world urgently needs: the courage to blend perspectives, to understand multiple truths without surrendering conviction. 

Her name, Dakota, a nod to the American Midwest, carries more than geography. It carries the grit and humility of the working-class families who shaped the Upper Great Plains, people who endured long winters, long odds and learned to keep moving forward. My own upbringing in that landscape was rough, hard and often uncertain, but it forged a toughness I now see reflected in her.

It is an unfashionable quality in a world that rewards shortcuts. Ours is an age of instant outrage and fleeting wisdom, where humanity searches for quick fixes to problems generations in the making. Jakarta, for all its motion and mess, does not indulge such illusions. The city demands patience. It humbles you. It makes you wait.

Those long walks were our small act of rebellion against the city’s chaos. They made the daily chore of walking our herd of hounds something more, a ritual of reflection and renewal that, in its own way, mirrored a truth extending far beyond our neighborhood streets. Walking together made the journey possible. Alone, the distance would have been too great.

It often reminded me of an African proverb: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

It is difficult not to see the wisdom in that, particularly in an age when so much of global discourse, economic, political and cultural, has become a sprint for individual advantage. Trade wars replace trade talks. Cooperation is dismissed as naïveté. Yet the greatest progress in modern history, the open trade routes, shared prosperity and hard-won peace – arose not from isolation but from collaboration.

When I think back on those long, dark walks with Dakota, our breath visible in the humid air, the dogs trotting ahead, I see more than a father and daughter finding time to connect. I see a metaphor for the path ahead.

If the world feels fragmented and divided today, the hope may lie in how this next generation chooses to walk it, together.

Dakota’s instinct is to reach out, to listen, to build bridges rather than burn them. She is generous with her time, patient in her views and deeply committed to helping others find common ground. I pray that these qualities, formed in the quiet hours of Jakarta’s streets, are not exceptions but early signs of a wider renewal.

If her generation, shaped by contradiction, raised on both struggle and abundance, can rekindle the spirit of cooperation that once bound nations, communities and families alike, then perhaps the world has not lost its way after all.

And that, more than anything else, is what keeps me hopeful on these long nights in Jakarta’s streets.

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The writer is chair of the American Chamber of Commerce in Indonesia. The views expressed are personal.