I still recall the exact moment when I said those words to my mother. I said that I would be away for at most two years. That I needed a change, but that I would be back. I landed in Munich shortly after. That was today, five years ago. Five years of waving goodbye behind the security check at the airport. Five years of welcome and farewell hugs. Five years of something that was meant to be temporary. Away, but not away. Abroad, yet still at home. And one broken promise. After all this time, I feel that I arrived at a crossroad with difficult decisions ahead. Staying, or going back. As Mark Manson writes in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, at some point a decision must be made. Leaving all doors open to do it all is the same as not doing anything. And that is the real danger. Even if the paths at the crossroad are very different, the good news is that most of the happiness they may lead to does not really come from the path but from how one decides to walk on it.

A picture from the day I arrived - an empty desk for a new start (March 31, 2018, 16:39)

"You bought all the healthy stuff". I woke up from the routine check out process at the supermarket and withheld the pre-programmed "with card please" just in time. I managed to produce a "I try to" along with a smile. The cashier looked anxious. "I should too, for my mental well being", she said. A few months earlier, the other cashier of the store had praised the reusable nets that I use for fruits and vegetables. He looked exhausted back then, and still does. Beyond the compliments, which of course felt good, what remained in my mind were the burnout signs. They reminded me how much we suppress those allegedly undesirable signs to the strangers (and not-so-strangers) around us, while the actual solution would be to talk about them. We come across hundreds of people every day, yet are more disconnected than ever. In the few seconds before the next customer arrived, I tried to formulate some encouraging words for the cashier, and went back to the anonimity of the city.

Sadly, some selfish interest underlies the vast majority of interactions we experience, like this letter from a Jehovah Witness, personally addressed to me in 2021