“Dar a luz.”
She said it in Spanish.
We had been speaking in English for the better part of an hour, the language of her profession, her ambition, the country where she felt alive. But when I asked what she was most proud of, something shifted. She reached past the available words and found the ones that fit.
"Dar a luz."
I stopped her. Because the phrase had landed on me with a weight I wanted her to feel too. I asked if she knew why she'd chosen those words.
She didn't. Not at first.
So I asked if something in them felt alive.
"Yes," she said.
I told her what she already knew somewhere beneath the knowing: that "dar a luz" doesn't just mean to give birth. It means to bring into the light. That Spanish, in its old wisdom, never separated the two.
She was quiet for a moment.
"Las alumbré. Mis hijas," she said softly.
I brought them into the light. My daughters.
And for a moment we sat together in that, two people from different countries, different stories, the same mother tongue, inside words that English had no room for.
Spanish makes the mundane feel magical. And often, we discard that magic for normal. As just the way it is. I don't. I am enamored by that magic. And when it slaps me in the face, I turn the other cheek.
Language tells us things before we know them. It reaches into the body and retrieves what the mind hasn't caught up to yet. My client didn't choose dar a luz consciously. She chose it the way you choose to exhale, because holding it any longer would have cost her something.
That got me thinking.
I have created things. Companies built from equal parts fear and instinct. Cultures shaped by what I believed people deserved. A family made from love and imperfection and the particular chaos of a man still becoming himself. I have made things I am proud of.
But the light. That is the true testament.
And when I ask myself honestly, not the polished version, not the LinkedIn version, not even the version I offer my children when I want them to admire me, when I ask myself what I have truly brought into the light, the answer surprises me every time.
Me.
Not a company. Not a brand. Not a body of work, though the work is how I got here.
Me.
The man underneath the credentials. The boy who arrived in a country that didn't know his name and learned to make himself legible in a language that would never fully hold him. The man who carried tender things for decades without looking at them directly, because looking felt dangerous, because when you look at the sun in the face, it blinds you.
These letters have been the alumbrar. Fifty-two dispatches disguised as leadership content, dressed in memory and metaphor, the occasional ghosts and flying cows, but underneath, always underneath, a man dragging himself out of his own shadow and learning to face the sunlight.
I did not know that when I began. I thought I was writing about leadership. About exile. About the people who succeed while feeling unknown. I was.
But I was also writing about me, which is the only way any of it was ever true.
My client found her word in the language she was born into. I found mine the same way, in the gap between what I said and what I meant, in the letters I wrote before I understood why I was writing them.
"Dar a luz."
To give birth. To bring into the light.
For fifty-two weeks, I thought I was writing letters. I've learned I was learning to see.
Letter 52. The promise ends here.
Which is awkward, because I seem to have one more thing to say.
See you next Sunday.
52 letters. 52 weeks. This is Letter 52—the end of a year-long reflection. A love letter to commitment, and to the possibility that one of them might meet you where you are. And if you're curious about the coaching work behind them → sundaymorning.coach
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