I own my reality

I own my reality. This past weekend, on the last day of 2025, I ran the International Circuit of São Silvestre here in São Paulo. It's a very traditional race, and I ran it for the first time at its centenary edition, so a lot of special stuff was going on. It's not my first race, but at 15 kilometers, it's my longest one. My goal was simple: to finish it and run the entire circuit.

I was joined by my wife, who is an athlete. She trains running every week and has competed in many races. Our friend Igor, also an athlete, ran with us too. It was a great experience. Races like this always make you think about your goals and about the goals of the people around you. There were almost 50,000 people running that day.

Recently, I saw a video by Casey Neistat about a guy who ran the New York City Marathon with some kind of paralysis. It made me think a lot about reality. Reality is a singular experience for each of us. Most of the time we think about reality as a whole, as a shared home between all humans living at the same time as us. But I've been thinking about it differently. Reality is actually a subset of this whole, unique to each person.

I really think I've come to a point where I own my reality. I own my mistakes, I own my accomplishments, I own what I live. I'm very grateful for this experience. I'm very grateful for living it right now. I'm very grateful for having amazing people to share these accomplishments with.

For instance, my wife and I had to leave our first child with someone. We weren't prepared to take him to such a noisy and crowded event. We also had concerns about the weather conditions. So we have two beloved friends, Thayná and Joel, who helped us by watching him during the race. That makes me think that even while owning our reality, we depend on other realities. We depend on other lives, we depend on the love of people, and we depend on loving people. So owning your reality is understanding this interdependence.

It was a whole challenge just to make the trip: waking him up early, taking him to the car, doing a 30-minute drive to drop him off without us, then driving back to the center of São Paulo. When we arrived, we had to park the car 2 kilometers away from the starting point. We ran those 2 kilometers before the actual race even began, just to get there and enter on time. Then we waited about half an hour for the race to start.

In the end, we finished the race, together. It was wonderful, it was beautiful. The city of São Paulo is wonderful and I love it (even being hard to do so). Our son had a wonderful time with Thayná and Joel. Our friends did too. It was a very real day. It was the last day of 2025. A very real day.