Week 14 of 54 — Sliding Doors

Two evenings ago I was in the car with my brother, and I wouldn't even remember it, if it weren't for one small thing that happened and everything it made me think about afterward.

I'm in one of those weeks where you can't breathe.

I just got back from Argentina, and I threw myself into work without even putting my suitcase down — two weeks in Caserta with the team, preparing something big that launches in a few days (maybe I'll tell you about it, not now).

Up at dawn, going until late at night, eating at the office and starting again. "High intensity," the good ones call it. I call it not knowing what day it is anymore.

That evening, on our way out to dinner.

I told my brother to put the restaurant in the GPS.

At some point I look at the road and something's off.

"Mario, are you sure you put in the right place?"

He looks down at his phone. "Oh no, damn. I put in the right street but in the wrong town."

Same street, different town. The GPS was calmly taking us the other direction, totally sure of itself, and we were right there trusting it.

I complain a little (as I do) and in the end, ten minutes later, we get there.

Ten minutes. I didn't really care, honestly.

Except that in those ten minutes I started thinking. (I know, I know. I can't help it. This newsletter is also that: someone who can't stay quiet inside his own head even on the way to dinner.)

Because those ten minutes weren't ten minutes.

On the clock, sure. But stop for a second. In those ten minutes we drove down streets we never would have taken. We saw things we wouldn't have seen. We avoided a car, an intersection, maybe trouble. Maybe we avoided something worse. Even just my mind: ten minutes before I was one person, ten minutes after I was another, with different thoughts, different choices.

This isn't bar-room philosophy. It's that every micro-choice, every single second, sends you into one life and erases another. It's just that the lives you don't live, you can't see. And so you think they don't exist.

There's that film — I couldn't even remember the title, then it came back to me: Sliding Doors. There's a woman who has to catch the train. In one version she makes it on board. In the other, the doors close in her face. That's all it takes. One train caught or missed. And the film shows you both lives in parallel, and they are two completely different lives. Different people, different loves, different ending.

(Spoiler, sorry if you haven't seen it. But it's been twenty years, at some point that's on you too. In one of the two, she dies. There you go. Now you know. You're welcome.)

It's devastating to watch, because you realize your life is full of train doors just like that.

Except you usually go through one and move on, and the one behind the other door you never see.

Up to here, though, is the comfortable part. Because if it's all chance — the train, bad luck, fate spinning the wheel — then none of it is on me.

Life decides, I take my ten minutes and that's that.

But no. And here it gets uncomfortable, as always.

Because those ten minutes weren't a gift from fate. Those ten minutes were chosen by my brother, and before him by me (because I could have put in the GPS myself, you know).

He didn't check the town. He entered the address in a rush, his mind elsewhere, sure it would be fine. Life didn't do that. He did.

And the first instinct was: how can you not check.

Then I caught myself. Because doing things in a rush, not checking, not looking twice, not doing that one extra step that would clear the doubt, not going a little deeper into things — that's not a my brother thing. That's a me thing. It's the exact same habit I carry around. I just saw it from the outside, for one evening, from the passenger seat.

And here I'll let you inside. The Stefano who writes at night, alone, when he doesn't have to look good for anyone.

A while back, rushing as usual, I'd written this down:

▎ Running faster rarely takes you further — the one certainty is that it makes you miss the beauty of the path. That's the feeling that wears me down the most. It always has.

— March 10, 2024

I'd already figured it out, in black and white. And this week I was in Caserta pushing until two in the morning, rushing, skipping steps, doing things "because they'll do fine like this." The same wrong road as my brother. Except mine, no GPS flags it.

And so I get to the point. (And it's not the one that's going to make you feel better.)

The comfortable lie — the one society tells — is that the lives we miss are taken from us by chance. The train, bad luck, the fork in the road. It's convenient, because the blame stays outside.

The uncomfortable truth is that most of the lives we don't live, we take from ourselves. Not with the big dramatic choices — with the small ones. Because behind every result, there's a behavior, a habit that stops you from being who you want to be.

With the thousand "whatever, it's fine like this" said without looking. With things done at eighty percent because who's going to notice anyway.

With that one extra step we never take, out of habit, without even realizing it.

Ten minutes, once, is nothing. But a habit doesn't make you pay once. It makes you pay every day, for years, in a currency you can't see: the things you don't notice, the people you don't really look at, the version of yourself you never become because you were in a hurry.

It's not the time you lose. It's who you don't become while you're losing it.

I don't have a solution, not even for myself.

But I have plenty of questions, and that's a place to start.

How many of the lives you could have lived did you lose not to bad luck, but to a habit you can't even bring yourself to look at?

And one more thing, before I say goodbye.

(this one saves you 5 years of anguish and questions)

The choices you really need to watch out for aren't the big ones — the ones you sit with for days: those, you usually find a way through. It's the others that get you. The ones you make without thinking, that you don't even notice, and that turn out crooked, never quite what you wanted. Waking up slowly, setting multiple alarms, getting up instead of sitting back down. That's the warning bell.

And the bell is more insidious than it seems.

Because some choices you don't make out of distraction: you make them to confirm who you've already decided to be (or who you've been led to believe you are).

It's not that you're always late — you're the one creating the delay, without realizing it, just to confirm that you're someone who runs late. It's not that people always leave you — you're the one who eventually makes the move that pushes them away, so the story you tell yourself stays true.

It's not that you never make it to the end — you're the one who quits one step before, so you don't have to find out that maybe you could have made it, because if you actually do, could you handle what comes with it?

But when you manage to be consistent with the things you actually want to change: ahhh, that's when you feel at home with yourself and think "yes, this is right, now I'm really me."

And this is where life screws us.

It's called identity, and it's been stitched onto us.

And no, I'm not the only one sick enough to have these thoughts at night in a car. That bell is there for all of us. Most people have just stopped hearing it ring.

One day I'll properly explain everything I've learned behind that one simple sentence about identity. But that's another letter, another time.

Fifty-four attempts to become better. This is the fourteenth. Best, Stefano.

Ah, I really do think these things. I don't build them for the letter — I'm genuinely thinking them in that moment, and trust me, it hurts a lot more than it looks.

Fifty-four attempts to become better.
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