I Love You. Thank You.

In mid-April last year, one of my dearest friends was diagnosed with stage IV brain cancer.

Official medicine had no cure.

His wife is one of my closest friends. They have an eight-year-old daughter.

For the first week, all I did was cry.

They were incredibly difficult months. The queen of problem-solving couldn’t find a solution.

“Everything is figureoutable.” Until it isn’t.

That experience forced me to confront the deepest questions of existence.

At some point, probably thanks to my growing interest in neuroscience, the YouTube algorithm suggested a topic I had never seriously considered before:

The hard problem of consciousness.

A door I had never noticed.

And once I crossed that threshold, an entirely new world opened up.

I discovered Federico Faggin, Bernardo Kastrup, and many others proposing a radical reversal of the paradigm:

Not consciousness emerging from matter.
But matter emerging from consciousness.

Wow. That would change my understanding of… everything.

In June 2025, a couple of months after my friend’s diagnosis, I shared my thoughts with a close friend. I told her about the pain and helplessness, but also about this unexpected parallel journey into quantum mechanics, consciousness, and philosophy.

She told me she, too, was going through a transformative period and had recently discovered a Hawaiian philosophy called Ho‘oponopono: a practice based on the idea that everything is deeply interconnected, and that our inner world profoundly shapes the outer one.

The mantra was incredibly simple:

“I love you. Thank you.”

Love and gratitude.

The next morning, I was walking my border collie, Lucy, along the river. It was drizzling. Hardly anyone was around.

A young man in cycling gear walked toward me, pushing a road bike beside him.

As he passed me, shoulder to shoulder, he looked me straight in the eyes and said:

“I love you. Thank you.”

Then he kept walking.

I froze.

My rational mind immediately thought:

What the fuck kind of coincidence is that?

Especially because the practice involves repeating the mantra silently to yourself, not randomly saying it to strangers.

I turned around and shouted:

“I love you toooooo! Byeeeee!”

He never turned back.

A few seconds later, I sent a voice message to my friend describing exactly what had happened. That chat still exists.

Statistically, it felt wildly improbable. And in the following days, other remarkable “coincidences” happened too.

Only later would I discover Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity: meaningful coincidences connecting inner states and outer events without obvious causality.

Even today, I oscillate between two interpretations.

Some days, I think it was a masterpiece of synchronicity.

Other days, I wonder whether it was simply cognitive bias.

But more and more often, I feel reality may be infinitely larger than what we perceive with our senses.

And once you begin to suspect that, you can no longer go back.

The journey has begun.

I still don’t know where it will lead me.