When I launched my last company in September 2022, I did it from an uncomfortable folding hospital chair. I wasn't the patient, but my 2-year-old daughter, who had been having so many seizures that she had to be evacuated by helicopter from the hospital in Lanzarote to the Materno Infantil Hospital in Gran Canaria. It was never really known why she suffered the encephalitis that caused those seizures. Probably some of the viruses that were detected managed to alter the balance of her brain.
After the night of horror we spent in the hospital in Lanzarote, where for a moment I thought she was gone, I cried that morning when my angel was finally resting tied to a bed and after having passed the worst of the crisis. Days after that episode and hoping that time would do its magic so that my daughter could recover, I launched my company from that hospital chair. Everything went well, the girl recovered completely and the company has enjoyed significant success that has allowed hundreds and hundreds of investors to better understand the financial markets.
That's real life. New projects are often not launched from glamorous places and situations, but simply from where you can. For everyone, absolutely everyone, life is difficult, it is a continuous battle and struggle. All the good is mixed with the bad. All this comes to mind because right now, today December 20th at 3:14 in the afternoon, I am again on a sofa with my laptop accompanying my daughter while she sleeps here, in the hospital in Lanzarote.
And I remembered all that, the beginning of that company and how I launched it. It seems that this time it is the flu A that has managed to alter her brain. She will recover, I know because this time the episode has been mild and not acute. Within the bad, this will allow them to do more tests and thus try to understand why her little brain is so delicate. Be that as it may, everyone has an Achilles heel in their health and hers is this.
We will probably spend Christmas inside the hospital, but that doesn't create any kind of unease for me. On the contrary, being next to my daughter in her worst moment gives me a feeling of fullness in my heart that no aspect of Christmas has ever created for me. Not even when I was a child, right now I don't miss anything from the past, but I enjoy this present as it is. Is it possible that this is my happiest Christmas, here, sitting in a hospital chair waiting for my daughter's next smile? Something tells me that one of the real meanings of this life is to give, to offer, to spend oneself for others. I'm not putting myself in a divine plan, but I sense that the human being as a species owes a good part of its success to its social capacity and collaboration with other congeners. And that, by sacrificing for others, many brain and body mechanisms reward that behavior.
Whether divine or biological or both, that seems to be one of the truths of this life. Suddenly the idea jumps into my head that one is a kid while fighting for their interests stubbornly: mine, mine, mine. And that when your heart only begins to fill when you act in favor of others, it is because you have reached maturity. Perhaps, I speculate, I intuit and even wish, that this is my case now that I am 41 years old.
It is still funny, curious, paradoxical that we spend half our lives wanting to be and have more and that when you reach the theoretical middle of your life, you are actually only happy to give, offer and wear yourself out for others. Does this story have a moral? I don't know, because it's not a story either, it's reality, a reflection that gives me the waiting time and that allows me to write what I want. Without correcting any previous line. I wish you a Merry Christmas and the best in the world. Whoever you are.
