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I AM HERE NOW I have always started a trip with a return ticket, but this time was different. The few months that I had spent in South America the year before had just been a sparkling sip of the variety that the world has to offer, and I was thirsty for more. A multitude of factors influenced my decision to move to the UK, including a whispering call for pragmatism and self-affirmation. The fascinating thought that I barely knew the culture whose language leads the majority of international communications, made me take the step forward that I needed to land in London at the end of a very freezing and rainy January which I soon would learn is the norm. Although I was quite confident in my ability to adapt, the beginning was surprisingly tough. My Mediterranean heart clashed with such a different approach to relationships and life in general. The linguistic barrier isn’t anything more than a cultural gap, revealing empty words that we fill with meanings more related to who we are, rather than mere explanations in a dictionary. I started learning this different language and the more I knew, the more I enjoyed it. I liked when due to interjections of individualism I softened my very cute Italian passion for drama with self-responsibility, giving up scenographic episodes of demolition and reconstruction to embrace the patient art of daily repairing. I also liked how, when immersed in a performance-based society, I converted my passion for running into a goal and signed up for the London marathon. Training for the marathon has been a journey of discovery, during which my eyes crossed my body and following each breath, sewed my mind with the movements of the muscles, as if they were the experienced hands of a tailor. I witnessed the metamorphosis that had already started some time ago being fully carried out and I felt at one with the environment where I had been living in. I guess that running taught me how to stay in the present. During the tough sessions of my training for the marathon, if I had started overthinking about the distance I needed to go, or even about the final goal (the marathon itself), I would have stopped immediately - saying to myself that I was not able to do it. The only way for me to do it was just to stay focused on a day-by-day plan, concentrating on the motions and trying to stay away from any sort of concerns or conjectures related to the future. This also turned out to be a very good exercise for my life in general. Training for a marathon is like training for life, and it has revealed to me the beauty of embracing every single moment and not resisting whatever life throws at you, whether it be joyful or not. Embracing the pain, walking with it, being his friend. This precious friendship saved me from the risk of ending up confined to a fake universe in which I’d have gone along with scenarios created by my imagination, preventing me from truly living. The pictures that our mind produce are usually more pleasant and appealing than the reality, but there is a small problem with that…they do not exist. There is so much life in each moment surrounding us and pain is part of that. Embracing the imperfection is a way to appreciate what that really matters. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if it hurts or becomes harder than expected, it’s life and it means that I am alive.