Scribbles from 2023: A Year's Journey
I'm writing this for myself, but whoever is reading this is - you’re welcome to listen in.
"That which is the most personal is the most creative"
– Martin Scorsese
Why am I writing this?
This year felt special - I found stuff within myself that i didn’t know was here. There's this fire inside urging me to seize life.
I feel stronger, wiser, more in tune with the world around me. I'm excited about the future, proud of who I am today, comfortable in my own skin, and so, so ready to keep moving.
I feel an urge to get some of this down - to snapshot the current state of my mind - to remember, to celebrate, and to inspire myself in the future.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
– Carl Jung
What made this year special?
A lot of things happened, and it’s hard to wrap my head around or even make sense out of everything - even harder to put it all into text. So for the sake of this essay, i’m gonna keep it short, here are the three things that i feel like had the biggest impact on this year feeling so novel.
Carrear Shift
I’m still at Rely, still pushing to grow this thing - closing in on my 3rd year in the company. We were 5 when I first joined - we’re going into 2024 with a team of 19, which is insane.
This year we stepped up in terms of maturity and growth. We’re facing really interesting challenges head-on and attracting incredible people to help tackle them.
Having a vision that you’ve been contributing to for a while materialized into reality and validated by people you admire pushes your internal model about what believe to be capable of. You start dreaming bigger. You start trusting yourself more, and because of that, you become more confident in situations where the path to success is not clear - because you trust yourself to find it.
I shifted my role from software developer to product management pretty early in the year. It's been a mix of feelings, but overall positive!
I'm venturing into areas I never thought I'd explore.
Developing a lot more people skills which contribute more to enriching my personal life.
It’s also been fun to focus on big picture stuff, and tying technical knowledge with sales, marketing, customer interactions…
Body Shift
Continuing with the momentum from 2022, this year was by far the one where i exercised the most… ever. I got some statistics to prove it:
I went to the Gym 71 times
I ran (at least) 230 Km
Including a half-marathon that i finished with a pace of 4m45s
I went to 45 of Bhout’s hit-boxing classes
I went to 18 Jiu-jitso classes
I played paddle (at least) 14 times
I went to 4 Muay Thai classes
I did a tone of calisthenic work-outs (in-door and out-door)
I did a tone of in-door yoga sessions
Why? Well early in the year my cousin inspired me to start a program called 75hard which consists on:
For 75 days straight working-out twice a day, following a self-imposed diet, reading 10 pages of a book and drinking a shit tone of water (i added a custom rule of no smoking).
I never fulfilled the challenge. I tried 4 times - furthest I got was 46 days.
But while attempting, something changed - i got hooked - to the feeling of empowerment, to becoming stronger, to moving, to feeling present and experiencing a deeper connection with my body.
I lost 12kg in the process, stopped smoking and I transformed physically and mentally. I’m holding on to this for dear life as I feel like it’s something so essential yet so fragile.
“We have been taught to neglect, despise, and violate our bodies, and to put all faith in our brains, Indeed, the special disease of civilized man might be described as a block between his brain and the rest of his body.
(…)
The “primary consciousness”, the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present, and perceives nothing more than what it is at the moment.”– Alan Watts, Wisdom of Insecurity
Deeper Intensity
Over the last years a lot of the people that I hanged out with daily, left Lisbon - trend continued and I was forced to partially re-built my social life here.
I reengaged a relation with a group of friends from high-school that give off family vibes, It’s one of the healthier groups that I’ve been a part of - lots of love, transparency, encouragement. They took me under their wing, made me one of their own and I’m really grateful for what they brought into my life.
Besides that group, I put myself out-there more, pushed me to meet new people. I made interesting friends, I flirted, I showed interest and people showed interest back.
The peak experience in the entire year both socially and spiritually was Boom festival. I was shining, alive, present, accepted and loved. It was the most intense experience I had since backpacking through Asia in 2019.
It was beyond the festival itself, my state of my mind / my energy was just elevating and accumulating for months, and at the festival I just exploded.
I was absolutely free, i felt magnetic, authentic, I had absolute power over life. I transcended my own self and became one with the community in those dance floors.
Part of what contributed to it being so great was the fact that I was surrounded by an incredible group of people made up both by old school and new friends - the perfect balance between the confort of home and the excitement of the unknown.
“The point of the festival is to enter a state known in India as “the other mind” where one is beyond oneself. Leaving the day-to-day routine behind into the timeless.
Every-day time is standstill but during the festival another sort of time rains - the eternity rains - regular ritualised access to eternity where really interesting things can happen. The festival funnels everyone in the space into one thing, one flow, one ocean, one eternal moment. The initiatory moment.”
– Joshua Schrei, The Emerald: Festivals! Initiation and the Brilliance of Eternity