This corner of the earth

Photos from Tasmania. March 2017.

Try to act as if your life was a movie. Hopefully, one that you’d like to watch.

Decisions, feelings, walls.

When you decide to do one thing, you are automatically giving up another. I’ve never thought of it that way. I have always made choices at the moment, the more important and life-changing they were, the more lightly I took them. And it has always worked out pretty well for me. I honestly find something beautiful in knowing that I can’t live it all, I can’t be everything. It gives meaning to the experiences I choose to live.

I think I’ve done really cool things, I’m proud. And I have been able to do those things in part thanks to not overthinking my decisions. Moreover, every time I’m about to do something big, I also make sure that I won’t be able to back out. For example, when in 2010 I decided to move to Berlin, I made sure I didn’t back down by calling the landlord and giving him a month’s notice. I knew then I was doing it for real and I put all my energy on it and things began to happen. One month later I was in my new city. And when 5 years later, I decided to finish that chapter and leave everything to travel Asia and settle in Australia, I did the same thing, gave a couple months notice and it was not until I bought my ticket that I finally shared the news with friends and family. I was not going to give anyone a chance to get the idea out of my head and put fear into my body.

The fact is that when I made these or other decisions, I naturally focused on all the things I was opening myself to, that’s what made it so easy for me. But at the same time, I was giving up other things. Not that I didn’t know, but there are many levels of consciousness. Age and experience broaden your perception of life, you climb steps and reach new levels of understanding. Now that I think about it, it makes sense and explains why every year everything seems to be much more complicated than before. It’s not that I think things over … but there’s just a lot more to think about. Many more details, shadows, colors to take into consideration. It makes the days seem much shorter, the feelings much deeper, the pain of distance is more real and love is truer than ever. It’s so hard and yet so beautiful. It’s like looking at the same painting year after year, but distinguishing increasingly better the colors, appreciate how splendid and perfectly complicated it is.

I smile as I write this, and I’m grateful to be writing it in a coffee shop so I won’t let my tears flow. Of happiness. Because once again, writing helps me understand.

For a long time, I have thought that being strong and being vulnerable were mutually exclusive. That’s why, I feel, I build walls. They keep me from feeling what I don’t want to feel. But life catches up with you. It’s ok to miss people, places, things. It’s more than ok to feel sad about it. And it’s finally catching up.

But I can already feel a little breeze of fresh air coming in throw the window I just opened.