I’ve past the the Rubicon a long time ago now. The Rubicon a is river in Italy associated to an expression that passing it, is a point of no return…
I’ve been carrying this for so long, that I’ve forgotten most of you don’t really know what I do in the dark, or why. So let me try, just this once, plainly.
It started when I was eleven. 1987. I was looking at a diagram of an atom the little nucleus, the electrons going around it and something turned over in my head. It looked exactly like the solar system. And the solar system looked like a cell. I remember thinking: it’s the same picture, just at a different size. Scale wasn’t a measurement. It was a direction you could travel in. A coordinate.
I didn’t have the words then. I’ve spent the rest of my life finding them. That child’s flash became the thing I call TMOA my attempt to write down the one structure that repeats itself at every scale, from the smallest thing we can measure all the way up to the galaxies. One law, written over and over, just larger or smaller depending on where you’re standing. Resolution changes the view, not the reality. I said that to myself decades before anything came along to prove it.
Here’s how I see the world now, and why this matters to me the way it does.
We live inside systems most people never stop to question money, markets, and now the machines we’re building. I’ve spent my life looking at them the way I looked at that atom: not at what they claim to be, but at how they’re actually built underneath. And what I see is that a lot of them aren’t natural at all. They’re engineered. Money that quietly loses its meaning year after year, so the hands closest to where it’s printed always stay ahead of the rest of us. Markets that are just another battlefield, where wars get fought without a single shot. And now the most powerful tool we’ve ever made being built fast, by a few, mostly to serve the same old interests.
That’s the threat. But the same moment is the opportunity because the foundations are being poured right now, and foundations can be poured differently.
I understood something a long time ago, more than thirty years back. I had a choice. With what I can see and what I can build, I could have walked it straight to the people at the top and made myself useful to power. Comfortable. The prince’s seat is always open to anyone willing to bend. Or I could refuse that, keep the work clean and free, and pay for it with my own back.
So I carry bags at night in a hotel, and I build the rest of the time during the day. By choice. Not because no door was ever open to me, but because I won’t hand what I’m making to the ones waging today’s wars on the battlefield, in the markets, wherever they fight them. If this thing is going to mean anything, it can’t be born already owned.
That is the price I decided to pay so we have a better chance tomorrow, but I’m strainned, runned now, and could use some help if I’m honest, the work is on the last mile, but I could really use some fuel… still one way or the other, help or no help. I won’t stand down, I won’t give up.
Why?
That is the wrong question!
What for?
For a chance of better world! For the children of today and tomorrow! All others seem to have decided to die already, some even paid for their own casket and are proud to have reactangle of land in the cemitery…
I’ve made my peace with what that costs me. What I’m building is like planting an orange grove. You put the trees in the ground knowing the soil and the years and the patience it takes and knowing the tree doesn’t fruit for the one who plants it. I may never taste a single orange from this. That’s alright. I’d rather plant honestly and go hungry than eat from someone else’s poisoned field.
What I hope for is simple. That my family tastes them. That you do. And if not us then the kids who come after, the ones who’ll grow up never knowing it could have been any other way, picking the fruit without a second thought about who put the trees in the ground.
I’ll be straight with you about a few things, because you’re my friends and not strangers.
This next stretch is the one that decides how fast any of it can grow whether the trees go in this year or in ten and the timing has never mattered more than it does right now. So if any of you are ever in a position to back something you believe in, or you know someone who is, I’d welcome a real conversation. Not a favour an honest one, eyes open, about what this is and where it’s going. Putting something behind it, even a little, is one of the truest ways to become part of it.
And that’s the other thing: if any of this resonates with you not the money, the idea, the direction of it then walk with me. I’ve carried it mostly alone for a long time, and I’d rather not carry the rest that way. There’s room here for the people who can see it.
But the truth is, the thing I’d want most has nothing to do with any of that. I’d want to sit across a table from you. Some of you I haven’t seen in far too long, and you live in my heart whether I say it out loud or not. Before the oranges, before the trees even fruit I’d just like to see your faces again, soon, while we’re all still here to share the meal.
Foi, É, Será. It was, it is, it will be.
I just wanted you to know what I’ve been doing in the dark, and why.
And if you can help, I want you to know, that now is the moment too
Thank you for still being here
Nuno
