Life is a Project

There is one rule in architecture and social engineering: whatever you want to build, if you have no foundation to start from, you will never define the project.

Life is our greatest architecture. And we are the project — inside an engineering that pursues imperfection as the highest measure of what a man can achieve.

Today I found myself inside a rehabilitation clinic. Many sick people, struck by conditions that had taken away their natural movement. And I understood immediately why I was there.

I had been chosen to understand human difficulty and to write it down — because if there is one thing the sick cannot do, it is say, with any precision, how much they suffer and why.

Suffering is the removal of ordinary actions. One day they are simply revoked. No explanation. Your life absorbs a condition. But the price is never disclosed in advance.

I encountered sick people I knew. One. Two. Three. Four. And I understood I was inside a lesson. But which one?

I remained young in spirit and watched the others readying themselves to cross over. Why? What was I supposed to understand?

The drive home was turbulent — layered with memories of shared moments, and everyone remembered Nando by his nickname: the man who calls his shot — and hangs it on the wall. The man who said outrageous things and then did them. Every single time. Nothing ever stayed a fantasy.

My daughter told me that when she saw me getting old she would lock me in a psychiatric clinic. My answer was simple: I asked her to find one full of women. That was the only place I would ever feel at home.

We were born from a woman, we men. And most of us would have gone back if we could. It was immutable. Unmistakable. And illness just a passage to say: I was here.

In the end, only one reading remained:

Yes, I actually knew him. He was not the man you expected. He was Nando — the one from Gillette.