Everyone’s driven by something.
The sun sets, and rises again. Always like this, for all humans who have passed through this earth.
All those that you and I have heard about, and all those we haven’t.
The heroes and the villains, the good guy and the bad guy, the historian with his pen and the warrior with his sword.
The author of the goal, and the goalkeeper who cried over the elimination. The winner and the runner-up.
The one who lived 100 years and the one who didn’t make it to 30.
For all of them, at some, or at many moments, the sun has already set, the night has come, and the question hit deep: What really matters? What’s the meaning? What are the guarantees?
The story of James and Niki is just one more case of these.
I am in love with Formula One. I am a man, born in the 80s, in Brazil. It was the perfect formula to explode in my heart the love and interest for these “flying cockroaches.”
Senna and Prost cradled my boyhood dreams, the hero and the villain, the student and the teacher.
I saw, live and in color, while I was painting my “Senninha” comic book, Senna’s accident. I remember my dad crying, I remember crying, I remember “saying goodbye to the TV”… and I remember how that interview of his, in Interlagos, some time before the accident, kept hitting my soul: “I don’t know, sometimes you think about stopping, getting old, having kids… an accident can happen. You never know when it’s time to stop”… (the words may not have been exactly these — by my own choice I didn’t go to YouTube to look up the original).
That interview and his death, I have already watched many times. Sometimes I find myself looking at YouTube, listening to Galvão, and watching those 20, 30 minutes between the start and the helicopter leaving the track…
Today, here in the U.S., I saw the gringos applaud a sport they don’t even know how it works. I saw my wife get emotional with the story she had never heard before.
I saw myself as a little boy again, looking at that 6-wheeled car, that world, those colors, the names, the scoreboard “just like on TV”… I remember hearing several friends say they watch “The Lord of the Rings” as a “Middle Earth documentary” — it’s their chance to see what they only read… today I understood them. After 20 minutes of the movie, I looked at my wife and said: I could spend the whole night watching this.
In the end, after almost 2 hours of living inside that world, I came back to mine… I danced with my wife at Universal Studios to the sound of a good Blues, crossed the mountains where the Hollywood sign is, parked the car 200 meters from where the Oscars happen, and walked into my house…
Today it’s been 6 months since I’ve seen my friends, or my parents. It’s been 6 months since I’ve felt my skin wrinkled by Curitiba’s rain. It’s been 6 months since I’ve known what it is to spend a weekend watching soccer and chatting in Portuguese.
Life is always like this — the titles or the back-to-back championships, the marriage or the various women, racing one more year or stopping before the fatal accident…
Unfortunately, or fortunately, life is not a question with pre-defined answers. It’s an oral exam, a speech. There is no right answer, there is no wrong answer.
And that being so, life, short and fragile as it is, always pushes you toward the same question: What really matters? And the answer, you write a little of it each day. Everyone is driven by something…