If this were your last day … How would you live it?
A couple of years ago I had a teacher who encouraged us with a simple, yet powerful phrase: “Question Everything.” But he didn’t stop there in his crusade for waking us up, he even challenged us, offering a reward for the student that could spot a—intentional—lie in his discourse during the course.
Anyone could think that his attitude only encouraged our distrust. But I truly believe that, by the contrary, reinforced our trust. The trust in our decision making process.
Who have not experienced love at first sight at least once in a lifetime? Those that deny it, defined as crazy the idea of falling for a person the first time they met. And this notion is not new, the first record of the use of the term “love at first sight” comes from the Greek, that referred to it as: “The madness of the Gods” and used the so famous god of desire Eros—Cupid—to explain how two person can fall in love, darted by his arrow.
So, if love is madness, I ask, how mad is a person that falls in love at first sight?
Seguir leyendo “Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?”
I consider myself a man of reason. But sometimes there are little gaps in the facts that cannot be explained with the logic of the world as we know it. The house at the end of the backyard is one of those.
Years ago I was hired by a company located in big warehouse which had a house at the end of the backyard. The house was built by the previous owner of the property, conceived as his rest house for weekends, but it was never completed.
All the employees referred to him as the Fat man, and when asked about him, everybody said, “You’ll meet him.”
Everything went fine with my job until strange things started to happen to me. Things disappeared mysteriously one day and appeared days later in the same place were left. The door of my office locked itself often with me inside. I started seeing people passing behind me on the reflection of my computer when nobody was there. I tried to give logical explanations to that kind of phenomena, even when I was truly lost.
I should confess that I’m amused by the incredible response of the people in social media celebrating the arrival of the character of Marty McFly to the hypothetical year of 2015. I should not be surprised considering it was a trilogy that marked an entire generation. My generation.
The most relevant ingredient of Back to the Future (BTTF) saga is the element of time travel, not a novel concept if we consider The Time Machine of H. G. Wells, but in contrast, BTTF certainly nailed the point of making time travel relevant to our individual lives, and how we can become better making a change to our past decisions.
I believe having the possibility to change the outcome of our regretful decisions it’s everybody’s dream that by now only exist in Sci-fi.
But can we predict the future in real life? Or change the events in our past?
I have a tenant in my backyard. A sparrow, a female sparrow that thought my backyard could be a good place to call “home” and dedicated weeks to build a nest above the spotlight. At the beginning she was fearful of my presence, flying away as soon as I opened the door, but as days passed by, we acquainted.
I followed the idyllic journey of life since laying the eggs, to the endless days of incubation until the hatching of the newborns, cute plucked little birds that filled my backyard with a melodious cacophony of sings exteriorizing their eagerness for living.
One day I came back home after work and the backyard was dead quiet. Curious, I peeked into the nest and found it empty. They finally flew away from the nest, I thought, and when I was about to get inside happy with the news, I looked down and found a little sparrow lying dead, eyes closed, with his small wings that failed him extended over the hard concrete floor and his peak open through which escaped his last breath of life.
What is the first thing you do after waking up and the last before going to bed?
Most probably you are not even conscious about it. It could be anything: going to piss, turning the TV set on/off or drinking a glass of water. But why that should be important to us?
In the same way an attractive book cover draws us to peek through the first pages of a book or the cliffhanger at the end of the episode of your favorite TV series makes us to tune for the next episode, the days in our ordinary lives are shaped by our expectations and the attitudes we have of them.
We stare at the news wandering why there is so much violence in the world and we feel alien at that concept, not knowing how violence can escalate to inhuman levels. The problem is that we don’t understand how our current behavior is linked to that violence. In other words, when we commit a bad deed we can’t instantly perceive the result, what makes us believe it was not that bad after all until our memory forget about it.
Every night I sit on the grass contemplating the everlasting universe, staring at the patch of stars that flutters excited like butterflies in spring. I search for the brightest couple that resembles your sparkling eyes.
The hours drain in the waiting for tomorrow thinking that if we share the same moon, the same stars and the same sky, we can’t be so separated from each other. Distance never separates two hearts that truly yearn for, because the will of my heart makes my mind travel to the end of the world to fulfill the dream of being at your side, imagining that I hold your hands and ask you if there is a way I can stay in your arms at least for a night.
Her name was Maria. She didn’t know she was destined to be president one day. But at her short age, as a first step, all that mattered to her parents was winning the little Miss Nepotism beauty pageant contest. Why not everybody can see how beautiful and charming our daughter is? The encouraging parents said.
The parents knocked at each door in the neighborhood, called all distant relatives—those email addresses included in the Merry Christmas e-cards, but not in the Christmas Eve’s prayers—, and recalled every favor made to friends since elementary school. Everybody had to buy a ticket, and everybody did. Not because Maria was the prettiest, but because those that flaunt power are feared. And more important, liked.
The man hunched on his chair. He looked back to the attendees from the corner of his eye trying to figure out what the hundreds of sights read on his forehead. Culprit, murder… monster, he thought. But there was no tag on his forehead, only creases and frown that were record of his anguish. And there was no need of a tag, the flamboyant orange uniform and the shining handcuffs were mark enough.
A bell rang and everybody stood in the courtroom. People said it was for receiving the Judge, but he was no fool. It was because of him. It was a stigma, like lepers. To tout the wrongdoings of wicked people and can be secluded. Because evil is a disease and is contagious. But morbidity weighed more than fear for those cramming the hall. People love to point fingers more than anything, and all fingers of the jury were on him.
