Great expectations are not always great expectations but might turn out to be great expectations in the end

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

So it has been a year since I went to NOISE in Bologna. For those of you who know me or who've been there as well or who've ever been to NOISE any time beforehand, you know how much those two weeks can change your life, and certainly my life has changed, or, at least, NOISE set off a couple of "chain reactions" (or maybe not chain reactions, because causality, as Siegfried J. Schmidt once put it, is a category of the human mind much more than a category of things or "reality". Anyway, I won't go there now...). So, of course, "anniversaries" like that are also moments where you look back; think back; 'feel' back; in the attempt to sort of judge or make sense of what happened to you or with you or through you in a particular period of your life.

Again, for those of you who know me (and for those of you who don't know me but read my blog; which I think are not a hell lotta people, but in my little head I often imagine some unknown, anonymous reader...), you know that this has been quite a rough year for me, to say the least; both on a private and a professional level. I wrote in one of my previous postings (Sketch of numbers) that 2008 is my purgatory, and to some extend, I still think it is/was.

But when talking to a friend of mine today, I realised one thing: I am so deeply, deeply grateful for this year too. Not only because I had this fancy jet-set scholarship that allowed me to travel around Europe and work on my PhD 24 hours per day, seven days a week (if I had wanted to). But mainly, obviously, because of the people I met and who've become my friends; people giving me the opportunity to sort of see myself again with new eyes; people who've - to make a very strong claim - allowed me to reinvent myself. Looking back, I realise how - despite all the shit that happened - privileged I am. I mean, after all, isn't it the most amazing thing to be able to change your life; considering there are so many people out there who - for whatever reasons, and even though they would like to - cannot change their lives? And isn't it amazing to actually change your life; considering there are so many people out there who - for whatever reasons, and even though they could - do not change their lives?

So, to sum things up, 2008 might be my purgatory. But what I forgot at the time I wrote that posting is: There are two ways out of purgatory. One is to hell. The other one is to heaven.