I’m standing in the empty field facing the main stage of the festival. Radiohead are 10 meters away, rehearsing their evening gig. The sea breeze blows, my hair flies around my head, Thom Yorke keeps singing, screaming, whispering, his words going straight to my heart. No filter, and no phone, no camera allowed – just the authorisation to stand there and listen to the sound check of one of the BEST BANDS ON EARTH on a windy, dusty Saturday morning.

Suddenly they stop and leave the stage, a clean cut that leaves me breathless, wondering if it really happened. 10 hours later, I’d be one of the tens of thousands dancing and crying to their music, losing all perception of what is work and what isn’t, losing all sense of the exhaustion of the past weeks, highs and lows mixed in an emotional blur.

That night I went to bed wondering how many experiences, how many feelings I can grasp that I can truly enjoy.

London said, “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.”

He also said, “The function of man is to live, not to exist.”

But how much can you truly live, I wonder.

Maybe it’s the accumulation of the years, the fact that each day brings its new lot of memories, but I just find it overwhelming sometimes. Maybe it’s because I love experiencing something, but I love reflecting on it even more. The moment you sit on a train after a trip and look out the window, your mind still lingering in the places you just saw… or that time of the day at dusk, when everyone comes together and you drink to the adventures of the day. The dawn after a big party. The end of a run, of a skiing day, of a long hike. Saying goodbye after a great weekend, taking a nap after a big meal, cycling back home after a good evening. Looking back and thinking, yes I did this, we did this, and it was wonderful.

Or maybe it was utter shit, but that’s not the point.

For the past months, I’ve been like a squirrel, saving all these emotions, all these sensations. I’ve put them aside, thinking I would reflect on them once I would be back home, back to a more normal rhythm.

And I have. The minute things slowed down a bit, I looked back and smiled at the frenzy of the past months, the travels, the stories, the networking, the brainstorms, the parties, and I breathed.

But at the same time, I think I’ve realised something. If I want this to carry on, and if I want to be happy carrying on with it, I want to embrace the madness as it happens. Make the meteor metaphor mine.