Like those who come home

The entrance of a new person in a team is usually a period of adjustments and search for new balances. What follows is not a "recipe for integrating people", but a possible contribution to this exercise that is less simple than it seems.

It's turning one year since I moved to Way Beyond 🥳. It's time to celebrate and say out loud the qualities of this team!

When I entered this house I didn't feel I was stepping on its wooden floor for the first time. I felt like I was returning to the house I had left not even five minutes ago, such was the feeling of already knowing its inhabitants and corners. A similar feeling to the one we have when we meet again an old friend we haven't seen for some years and we talk to him as if continuing what had been left hanging a while ago. You see, don't you? Those friends with whom, however many years pass, a few moments are enough for us to shorten the distance of time and space and widen the complicity through the memories of when our biography crossed paths every day.

It is from a group of people who have, among others, qualities such as those of friends that I would like to say a few things. On the one hand, because every day I think they have no idea how this year has enriched my path. And secondly, because I'm not at all good at keeping secrets like these that everyone should know about!

When I moved, not everything felt right: the joy and surprise of being challenged to be part of the Way Beyond team had meant leaving to share day-to-day life with people I really like and from whom I learned so much of what I am and know today, and leaving a place that was familiar to me and a project that was very dear to me. Not everything was familiar or easy, it's true: after all, I had worked in universities for the last 10 years and experience in the corporate world had been very sporadic and the beliefs I brought, based on the experience I had had in the only four (horrendous!) months I worked in a company and the long-held dream of doing my professional life exclusively at University, threatened to block me for a while.

On the other hand, I didn't know most of the people at Way Beyond out there, but the strange thing was that it seemed like I did. So where was that feeling of already being part of it for a long time coming from? The feeling was mutual, which made me very happy and helped me grow throughout this challenging year especially because it made me aware of the virtues of questioning beliefs and habits, drawing new possibilities and, above all, (training) accepting my vulnerabilities (and god knows what that cost me!, it still does, come on).

So I didn't even have much time to listen to those worries because the incredible people who already lived there gave me too much generous time to arrive, discover, get to know and find my place, without even realising that for so many years I was so afraid of the dark!

Therefore, Ângela, João, Inês, Sónia, Teresa, Lígia, Ana and Vítor, are all already under the design of those people who will stay with us forever because they give and give us enough time to learn, share and accommodate languages and let us walk our corner with a time of our own*, balancing trust, responsibility, doubts, conquests. Allowing us to find our place which is, at a certain point, more secure than when we started the path. So, naturally, in a permanent exercise of empathy and transparency and honesty ensured, among other things, by the pleasure of talking and discovering the other and by the pride of seeing him discover and find his purpose in general and, in particular, in a project that is intended, above all, to integrate the wisdom and qualities of each of those who are part of it.

And then they also allow me to write like this: as my thoughts, so often confused, flow. Jumping from theme to theme, finally able to assume what I still don't know, what I like and dislike and what I am, proud of the 10 words that, after one year, I choose to describe the short biography of who is losing that fear of the dark: curious, attentive, caring, with few roots and a high-flying heart.

One last thing I take for granted is the beauty and comfort of the feeling that, however many years have not yet passed, we have built this relationship on the foundation of trust, of curiosity, of respect, of each other's time, of love. And this is everything my duration needs: to know that the people I choose to be close to and who choose me believe that we really are the most precious thing in each other's lives.

And May has always been one of my favourite months. But it wasn't to talk about me that I came here, but about what makes Way Beyond a house where you want to live and socialise!

Long live May, long live you! Thank you!

*In the meaning attributed by Rilke: existence.