On the way to find (a missing part of) myself

I am an engineer, working as Senior manager in a multinational company where for more than 21 years I have been travelling around the world. I am also father of a teenage girl, a husband and a PADI diving instructor.

While busy in living my daily life, I became a middle aged man without realizing that the infamous 50yo were in sight.

In truth, there were some signs that I was not getting any younger but I missed them.

Few years ago, I started exercising and working out mainly to maintain a top diving fitness. That obviously meant the body wasn’t the same one of a young guy, even if I didn’t see it in that way.

But the body wasn’t the issue, it was more about the thinking, the mindset.

Slowly, things started to change. The career, the job, the lifestyle seemed all different, loosing their meaning. Basically nothing was making sense.

After years and years of working and living up to the maximum without questioning anything, I was lost.

I was missing something and I started searching for reasons and meanings.

I believe I was somehow unconsciously realizing that I was aging and the future I had left ahead wasn’t infinite.

So in the last couple of years I have being paying more attention to what I need or miss. Ultimately I have been busy in trying to discover who I actually am.

Because to know what you need, you first have to know your self.

In my teenage years, I had early interest for photography and philosophy which I abandoned as I felt a sort of obligation to master subjects useful to pursue a successful career and good income. So I went for a bachelor in mechanical engineering.

From that moment I have been fully dedicated to the job with rational focus on efficiency, performances and results with only a very short period of photography passion revival.

I became a diving instructor mainly because I wanted to be a better diver but soon I was overwhelmed by how I could make people feel happy, safe, accomplished, satisfied and by how great feeling that was.

I didn’t expect it, my purely rational life with satisfaction coming only from work related performances and it have never been able to give me the save nice and positive feeling.

That was the first moment of reflection which boosted the need of further search of myself. I decided to have a brief and easy look into my other youth passion, philosophy.

Reading about ancient Greece and modern philosophers like Heidegger and Nietzsche gave the clues I needed.

Now I see that we, as persons, have rational and irrational parts which have to melt together. If we lock away, crush down our irrational part as demanded by the modern world to be always more efficient, at one point we will inevitably and painfully miss out irrationality and start loosing ourselves.

Irrationality is what make us human, without it we are simply functionaries of systems, not much different that a machine.

Irrational is any form of art, irrational are our feelings, ultimately happiness is irrational.

This short writing is the beginning, my first step of a long journey which shall bring me to meet my irrationality and embrace it all.

Along the way I will exploit my creativity by writing, taking pictures and making videos. All this will expose myself as never before but it is necessary to regain my humanity.

Then everything will make sense, I know now.