Jorge Cortell

I have advised a king to abdicate and establish a republic, I have been completely surrounded by snakes, I have survived earthquakes, hurricanes and floods, I have traveled through the 5 continents circling the Earth over 30 times, I have been shot and poisoned and drown, I have overcome cancer, I've spent months in the hospital before I was even born, I have photographed archaeological excavations in a war zone and documented environmental disasters, I have won international sports championships, I have created software that has been used to cure millions of patients, I have lived with a severely ill psychiatric patient for years, I have been held by an anti-terrorist squad in Turkey, I have won awards in different scientific disciplines, I have dined in a palace with British Royalty, and lunched with ambassadors, I have served food to homeless people in Bangladesh, I have partied in California beaches with billionaires and I've surfed in Ibiza, the girlfriend of a Colombian drug lord did a striptease for me in front of him in Bogota, I have hacked the computer of criminals and handed over the evidence to the police which led to prison sentences, I have organized anarchist demonstrations in the streets of New York and strikes in Spanish classrooms, I've had more than a dozen surgeries and I have suffered fractures in my neck (two) and all my limbs, I fled from the secret police during the performance of a censored theater play in pre-democracy Spain, the police thwarted a plan to kidnap me in Peru, I have been under so much stress that I have cracked five teeth, in Moscow my bodyguard (unbeknownst to me) stopped the traffic with an AK47, as a child I was beaten so badly that one of my eyes changed color permanently (heterochromia iridum), I developed software in collaboration with NASA to be able to give my fiancée an extraterrestrial engagement ring and when it got lost I went down a volcano and got lava to make another, I've given lectures to thousands of people in a stadium and to dozens in Ivy League universities (Stanford, MIT and Harvard), I've seen birth and death, a policeman has stolen from me and a thief has helped me, I have climbed into the ring to fight in several different martial arts, as a child during a coup d'etat I stared for hours through the window at a tank aiming towards my apartment threatening to shoot, the university that forced me to resign later gave me two medals, I've been buried in the snow, I've seen my son sink into a frozen lake, I've been so rich that I went on luxury cruises, and I've been so poor that I could not afford basic utilities, I sailed on a fishing boat during a storm in the North Atlantic, a hurricane has lifted me off the ground, I have snowboarded in Canada during a polar vortex, I've cruised on a solar-powered catamaran... Above all, I've loved and been loved. I've found beauty.

And I'm only getting started... but all those moments will be lost in time,

like tears in rain.