On the distance

Beyond the sunset on the west

Tag: expath’s life

The meeting room’s window

Stockholm, September 2018

I’m sitting in a meeting room, wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt without a tie. Actions plans are discussed, a budget plan is proposed and a connection with our international partners is made. My colleagues speak and even though I am listening, my view is lost in one of the big windows. We are sitting in one of the tallest buildings of the city (which if you compre it to any industrial city is not that tall) in one of the upper floors and due to the flatness of the skyline and the lack of ugly glass skyscrapers I am able to see how the city spreads with its black metal roofs through the islands that and beyond them the archipiélago  seems not to end in the distance.

A plan is made, a critical path is analysed, someone is worried about the deadlines, the schedule is changed, their voices fade as my sight is lost between the boats sailing, the blue trains going back and forth in between the islands, and the people that look like little dots. I’m sitting here, but I am not really here. I have pursued to be here, but a side of thought of be somewhere.

I comment, collaborate, propose and discuss, yet I am a preconceived version of myself. The water reflects the white clouds and the birds fly down and up the water hunting for distracted fishes, while a part of my consciusness flies with them, away from what I call my life, away from who I am supposed to be.

Hands are shaken, roles are proposed, and everybody leaves the meeting room. As I walk through the corridor I look once again into the distance behind the glass window. I’m here but I am also there, because that is how I have always been, nowhere.

Hallå Sverige!

After spending a lot of time in my corporate job, I decided to change the way my life was going and look for a different career path. No, I am not talking about leaving my life and travel as a hippie bump around third world countries like a lot of folks do. I decided to go “green” in my career  and moved to the other side of the world for studies and that is how I ended up moving to Stockholm.

Why Sweden? I used to have a fascination for Scandinavian culture when I was a young kid, reading about the cold north and its vikings, but that wouldn’t be a good excuse as the modern swede is usually a leftist, politically correct modern man quite different of its ancestors. Sweden is considered the leader in green technologies; as for environmental engineering is one of the best countries in Europe for a degree, the quality of life is high, and the work benefits huge, …and why not say it open; Swedish women are famously consider to be beautiful.  I packed my clothes ,and my passport; took the plane to the land of Alfred Nobel, Abba and the one Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

I  was in the other side of the world again; this time older and with a different perspective of  life; for those reasons I decided to start again here in this corner of the internet.

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Stockholm view form Södermalm Island