How Life Is a Mill

Before anything else, I owe thanks to friends, to family, and most of all to Priscilla and to our Maria Flora. Even on mornings when the sky feels heavy, they remind me that living is more than checking boxes — it is tending to a gentle rhythm, keeping a space ready for laughter on the walk back home.

I have never seen myself as brilliant or heroic. I am simply someone who learned to rise early, honor promises, and rest with a calm mind. What gets me out of bed is not some towering ambition, but the hope of finding my family content — that quiet lamp in the living room that still glows after a long, demanding day.

When I look back at my teenage years, I see a curious kid facing the computer, wandering through forums, remixing photo blogs, losing track of time in endless matches of Counter-Strike and Worms. Back then I could not imagine that each sleepless night, each line of copied and tinkered code, was a discreet brick in the path I walk now.

That is how data engineering entered my life: without fanfare, like a steady breeze shaping the stones around a wheel. First came a report, then a makeshift pipeline, and eventually a project far too large for improvisation. By the time I noticed, I was already inside the machinery, turning with the mill.

In the daily grind I learned that data behaves like water. It arrives murky, carrying silt, memories, and unspoken fragments. My work is to carve channels so it can move, clear the stones, understand the current. When the flow settles, the wheel turns; energy rises, stories are told, decisions find their footing.

There are days when the mill grinds to a halt. The query stalls, the server grumbles, the mind loops without an exit. On those evenings I pause, letting the silence stretch, and remember that every obstacle hides a patient lesson. The same curiosity that drove me through dusty websites still lives here; it unties knots, nudges me toward a different path, persuades me to refactor, to ask for help.

And when night finally settles, I head home feeling that every processed line carries a face, a reason. The trade I never dreamed of became a way of caring for the people I love — because delivering good work is also a promise that, tomorrow, their world might feel a touch kinder.

Perhaps life really is a mill: it never stops turning, even when wind falters or catches us off guard. Today I move forward with gratitude worn into my chest, attentive to small omens, willing to keep honing this craft that chose me slowly. May I keep turning grain into flour, data into story, routine into care — knowing that a trace of sweet melancholy keeps me listening for the next shift of the wind.