In this space I am supposed to write about me: who I am, where did I studied, what I do for living, blah, blah, blah...
But then I asked myself: Why? Why I should do that? And who the hell cares anyway?
So, instead I chose to share with you something I read:
According to investigations, our heart starts beating around the third week of gestation. From the very first beat of our heart, we start desiring. At that point we still don’t know what we want, because it will take three more weeks to the brain to generate electric impulses.
So, for three weeks, we experienced pure and unconditioned desire, absent of the prejudices and constraints of the mind.
What was what we wanted at those moments?
I don’t know what I wanted, but I do know, whatever it was, I was so eager to experience it that scared my mom moving in the womb before the tenth week.
I came to this world in the times of the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the unveiling of Apple’s Macintosh, Ronald Reagan’s reelection, the identification of AIDS and Hepatitis viruses, the first documented case or a robot killing a human in US, the sign of the agreement of UK to return Hong Kong to China and the return of the Jedi to theaters.
Times of change indeed.
I am the last of two sons. I was the serious one, the well behaved in family reunions, the one that wandered with adults instead of kids, listening, observing, learning. Of course I enjoyed child’s games, but one of my ears was always at adult’s chats. I started question everything, and most of the times those questions didn’t come out of my mouth, so I learned to figure out myself.
Now as a grown man, I keep doing the same. Back then were just silly questions, now I deal with dilemmas like the purpose of life and existence. I don’t have all the answers, I will never have them. But I do know that, it doesn’t matter how complex the question is, we have to deal with them like silly questions.
Once I learned that if you want to comprehend a society you need to look from the opposite ends to figure out what is in the middle.
In the case of our lives, that’s before our birth, and the end of our lives. Hardly can we remember what we did at age of three, asking for remember the womb will be too much.
But what about our death?
Can we easily visualize that moment?
Most of you will think I am crazy thinking about projecting ourselves to that moment, but it has a reason. Most people in the verge of death, declares to experience clarity of thought, an illumination, a revelation about life. In the same way, terminal ill patients and survivors, or people with near death experiences feel themselves reborn in the way they experience life.
I know it’s cliché, but their answer is summarized in “Live each day like if was the last.”
Now I ask you: what would you do, if this day were the last of your life? How would you live it? What would be your last desire?
No clue?
Like I said, from the first beat of our heart until the last, our spirit desires: Longs for, clings to, suffers for, and that is the reason why we are here… to experience.
Your Last Desire is first, an experiment to me. A place where I plan to portrait in my writings—yes, I do like to write—my impressions of life from the perspective at the opposite ends, where desire is deprived from logic. In other words, I want desire questioning logic, logic questioning desire, desire questioning desire and logic questioning logic.
Does this have a use or purpose?
I want to believe that understanding how both work in our lives helps us to discover who really are and differentiate from who we think we are, what we think we desire and what really desire. That is the second reason of Your Last Desire, I hope this words can in some way contribute in any aspect of your life—for entertainment, learning, critic, mock, you name it, complaint or laugh worth the same.
I could sound naïve hoping that a word could change a thing in this complex world. But I must share with you, like everybody I have been through hardship in this life, and in those moments a word had power enough to make me surpass it. I am not speaking of the power of solace, but action. Our entire actions were words before accomplishing them, and were thoughts before being words.
That is the power of words.
And words are what I have for you.
I hope you enjoy them.
M. Ch. Landa