The Present Deserves My Attention · Week 41
By Luca Bonafede · October 11, 2026 ·
A lot can happen in a week.
The more you put into Life, the more you get out of it.
What better way to discover Québec City than by running 21 kilometres through it? The half marathon of the Marathon Beneva de Québec: another last-minute bib, nearly 21,000 participants at the event, and a city I had deliberately avoided looking at pictures of. I’ve always preferred meeting places the same way I meet people: without too many expectations, allowing them to surprise me.
And Québec City certainly did. What a beautiful place to begin again (for the 16th time).
An intensive French course followed, and I’m already seeing the results. The real exam came outside the classroom: my very first date entirely in French. No subtitles. It reminded me that a language is much more than vocabulary. It’s another way of entering someone’s world.
A new 24/7 gym, just minutes from home, because discipline shouldn’t depend on the weather. And apparently, there’s a circus right in my neighbourhood. Sometimes Life puts on a show simply because you decided to go for a walk.
I’ve often described my Life as a movie, sometimes a video game. But after being compared to a character from the same book five times in less than two months, perhaps I should add a novel to the list. For the record, I still have absolutely no idea what this book is about, so don’t quote me on that.
Somewhere in between, even a simple card game delivered an unexpected message. It was an exercise in class: one card showed a word tied to my recent past, and right next to it, in French, sat another one. “Fin.” The end.
Newfoundland is over.
I realised how easily we cling to the recent past, perhaps because it’s familiar, perhaps because moving forward means accepting that certain moments will never happen quite the same way again.
But isn’t that precisely what makes them valuable?
One last Iceberg beer to honour what was, and then back to what is.
I’ve spent much of my Life learning how to arrive somewhere new. Perhaps the harder lesson is learning when to stop looking back.
Which brings me to the song of the week: “Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode (1989). For everything I managed to do in these seven days, I felt like a personal Jesus. Not for others. For myself alone. Sometimes you need to make, create and be your own miracle.
There is a lot that goes on behind “keep moving” and “don’t stay still.” The moment you start doubting yourself, the spiral can take you to some very bad places very quickly. So you keep moving, and you perform the miracle yourself.
New city. New language. New routines. New people. And an entirely new collection of stories waiting to happen.
The past deserves its memories, but the present deserves my attention.
After all, a Life worth remembering requires a willingness to keep living it.
A lot can happen in a week.
Thank you, and ciao for now.
Luca Bonafede
Quebéc City, QC, Canada 🇨🇦
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