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 5 continents circling the Earth over 30 times, I have been shot at and poisoned and drowned, 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 illegal deforestation in the Cambodian jungle, I have won international sports championships, I have created software that has been used to cure millions of patients inspired by my wife's cancer, I 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've had breakfast with cabinet members on a private island in Bali, lunched with ambassadors, and dined in a palace with British Royalty, 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 gathered evidence about an organized crime group and handed it over to prosecutors which led to arrests and political resignations, I have organized demonstrations in the streets of New York and strikes in Spanish classrooms, I've had more than a dozen surgeries and I have fractured my neck (twice) 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 (traumatic heterochromia iridis), I developed software in collaboration with NASA to be able to give my fiancée an extraterrestrial engagement ring and for an anniversary I went down an active volcano and got lava to make another, I'm the first person in my family to attend university, I've given lectures to thousands of people in a stadium and to dozens in universities (like Stanford, Oxford, MIT and Harvard), I've witnessed the birth of my children and I've held a loved one in my arms as he exhaled with last breadth, a policeman has stolen from me and a thief has helped me, I have climbed into the ring to fight in several martial arts, I'm the father of a videogame character, as a child during a coup d'état I stared for hours through the window at a tank aiming towards my apartment threatening to shoot, I've bled under a waterfall in an Indonesian jungle, 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've lived in a skyscraper in New York, a castle in London, a house on the lake in Canada, and a sea view mansion by the Med, I sailed on a fishing boat during a storm in the North Atlantic, in a solar-powered catamaran, in superyachts, a hurricane has lifted me off the ground, I have snowboarded in Canada during a polar vortex… 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.