10 Years Post

It's now 10 years since I started this blog. If you read my first post, you'll see that I was not so sure I would manage to persist on it and make it one part of my life. I can say that I've succeeded. Posting here has become one part of my life, I've turned it into an obligation, sometimes I don't feel much like writing, but I force myself to do it, I force myself to continue, to focus on something. I've written some posts in some really difficult moments of my life, and when looking back it amazes me that certain month of certain year I were able to put certain things aside and focus on writing some paragraphs unrelated to that situation and that maybe no more than 10 people would ever read. It's nice when someone still manages to surprise himself in a positive way.

10 years have passed, and obviously many things have occurred. For someone moving from thirty-something to forty-something I guess I have not gone through some of the expected processes: finally finding a "life-partner", having children... Well, for an Asturian these processes are not so evident, this is probably the place on Earth with the lowest fertility rate, and I think the percentage of people my age that have not found (and many of us have never cared at all) a person to share life with is probably really, really high. It's not a surprise at all, 10 years ago I had no interest on finding "that person", and hopefully that interest has not emerged over these years (I say hopefully cause I'm quite sure this egocentric bastard would not manage to keep a steady relationship). As I said, I've gone through some bad moments, some of them pretty bad, but it has helped me to better appreciate the good moments, and better understand what makes up those moments: family, friends, places...

Not having taken those expected steps does not mean that things have been static, on the contrary, I've changed so much in these years. My political positions have turned like 160 degrees, my main interests, the things that I appreciate the most... all this has changed a real lot. Something that in 2009 was hardly an idea became a necessity, almost an obsession (in 2012-13), to live abroad for a long time. I finally made it and ended up in one country that had never appealed to me that much, France, and it has become my second identity, my second motherland... Several years there quenched my thirst for change, and for several reasons I realised that it was time to return to my primary home, that now I appreciate much more than before. I keep my strong links with France, and one could say that in a sense I've changed from being a "citizen of the world" to being a "citizen of two countries and one continent".
My musical interests have not remained static either, but after many evolutions and having broadened my taste pretty much, now I mainly favour the same styles I loved 20 years ago.
As for work, from an external perspective little has changed, but my internal attitude is now so different. I no longer dream of "doing something significant", I still enjoy learning and coding (well, sometimes at least), but regarding work all I aspire to is to get easy assignments and reduce stress.

Many people feel sad (even terrified) about getting old. I think it was the same for me in the past, but not now. It's not because I don't appreciate this life, just the contrary. As time goes by we are all aware that the end is closer, but not everyone is aware of how having reached this point in the path is an achievement. People die at any age, under any situation, so being able to look back and see how the traversed path has got longer should relieve us and make us feel fortunate, make us give thanks to whoever-whatever we think has helped us reach this point. Already quite a long time ago I said this sentence "Cada día vivido es una victoria frente a la muerte / Each day we live is a victory against death". Some friends thought of it as a very depressive conclusion, about an obsession with the idea of death stalking us I guess... but it's not like that really, or at least only partially. For me it's light coming out of darkness... We are our memories, and the more memories the more we are. The last pages of Serotonin by Houllebecq (a crazy, amazing book) quite shocked me (I read it in French, which is one of my most unexpected achievements of this decade). The main character, sank in a depression that is literally killing him, prints pictures of his life and wallpaper his room, what is intended to be his last room, with them. They say that when you're going to die you see all your life pass at high speed, this was like a low speed version that provided pleasures that the present no longer hosted. The more things you have to fill that sequence, I think the more sense you can say your life has had.

This has been a very personal post, and if you have read it to this point, most likely you are someone that is a part of my life. If that's the case, I want to say Thanks, for having been there all this time and for remaining there in the future. I plan to continue to write boring paragraphs here, and I hope we'll be lucky to share a "20 years post" in 10 years time. I also hope we'll be sharing passages of our lives face to face, in front of a coffee (or a beer for many of you) more frequently than we do. You know that I'm a socially lazy person, but I appreciate more and more those shared moments. On se voit!