Our life is full of experiences that we judge as good and bad experiences, many times we think and judge the things that happen and we lament for the bad situations that we go through always looking for an explanation, but only when we consider them bad, however when good things happen to us we never reflect or ask ourselves why me? what did I do to deserve this blessing? I once read a book called "The Death of Ivan Ilyich" by Leon Tolstoy (Lev Tolstoy). It is about a successful lawyer who, facing imminent death, reflects on his life and believes that he has not lived it as he should have because he is empty and alone in his situation; However, and despite the hard plot about the events surrounding his passage towards death, I realize that it analyzes the emptiness and helplessness towards what we cannot handle, and not what we handle and it is a kind of question of why we fight? What if we could have a better death?
Life and death are sisters in this world and although it is true that when we walk in the hands of the first one we always see far away or deny the other, it is always there, waiting for its turn to accompany us on the journey into the unknown, so living life in the small micro worlds that we have made for ourselves is a step that we often take blindly and most of the time looking towards our past (which is no longer there) or towards our future that will always be uncertain because regardless of the goals we have, death will always be waiting for its turn.
So if we change this remembering so many things lived and this waiting for what tomorrow will be; for what today is being, for what I am feeling today, thanking every moment we are experiencing in the present and we value every smile and every tear, living intensely every success and every defeat; getting up every time we fall with the joy of knowing that we are alive, feeling the breeze caressing our face or the rain falling, as well as the scorching sun burning our skin when we are exposed; knowing that we certainly do not have any certainty of what tomorrow will be, but we do know that we are experiencing today and what we are doing today. Because our passage through this world has a meaning for us and it has a meaning for others, but that meaning for us is the one that marks a full existence, it is the walk through this world being in it, without belonging to it .
Yesterday I saw the story of a boy in a Latin American country who was dedicated to do charitable works and was killed when he was run over on a highway after having done his last charity work, recorded on video, the young man was only 27 years old; if we value his life from our point of view, depending on which one we have, we can think that his life will serve as an example for many that in a short time many good things can be done; On the other hand, if we see it from another point of view we can think that he did it wrong because tomorrow everyone will forget him and he stopped doing many things for him, to devote himself to philanthropy, and there is a third point of view that is the vision of himself, to know how full his life was at the time of meeting the unwanted sister called death, which says I am happy with what I am feeling and doing at this moment and it does not matter if tomorrow I am not because my today has everything it should have.
To have meaning or not to have meaning in everything we do is to give it the value that we think it has according to our beliefs and experience, sometimes we live life without meaning for us only thinking that it means something for our society or our environment without realizing that we are not really living fully; so what is living fully?
At present, due to the situation of the pandemic, many lives have had a stop, that is to say, many people have stopped living their lives thinking about continuing or normalizing it when everything ends and at this moment it has been more than a year since everything started, therefore, if we are still doing things or not doing things, postponing them for when everything ends, we should think about it better and change this way of doing it, that is to say, start living life today, without thinking about that future that we do not know if it will come and much less how it will come.
So, do I have to live life like crazy? Living life today is when we enjoy, feel, suffer and cry every moment for what is being and not for what will be, when we do things knowing that today are giving us sometimes unexpected results but the process matters and not the result and that regardless of tomorrow we are being happy today, which does not mean that we do things that destroy a possible future.
How is that done? For example at the moment of writing these words I am not thinking about how many people will read it, or if they will like it or not, or if it will create controversy or not, much less in the impact it may have or not, I am simply living it, enjoying and feeling in every keystroke I am giving, letting flow through my mind the thoughts that follow. Also at the moment that we make the decision to do things we have never done but have wanted to do, because perhaps we have always feared the unknown and do not take risks for what people will say, we have always been tied to a way of thinking that prevents us from seeing beyond, because it is at that moment of exploring all these things that we are living the present.
What am I doing differently to reach these experiences? I am doing what I like to do and have always dreamed of doing, which is to let my mind expand and go beyond the physical, beyond the real, beyond dreams, having as a reward, the joy of feeling alive at every moment with every written word, with every image that passes through my mind, reading stories as fascinating as the life of Stephen Hawking for example, who at about forty years old lost his mobility completely but managed to go beyond through his imagination, perhaps in an escape from the reality that subjugated him and achieved many things, perhaps without really proposing it, like Ludwig Van Beethoven who despite his deafness managed to create the most beautiful symphony ever heard, but what do I think that symphony meant to him? Because if we interiorize in his passion and in his experiences because I am not interested in his cultural legacy but in his internal struggles, his ghosts and his demons, as well as Horacio Quiroga, Vincent Van Gogh but not seen from the psychological point of view but rather spiritual and human because it is a paradox to think that we enjoy his works so much, but we do not realize the human being behind them and the struggle that was brewing inside him, nor the beauty of his world that sometimes we think or judge according to the story that we have been told, telling us to follow the example of how he achieved so much with so little, or with so many limitations or judging the suicide of some and the madness of others, without realizing that, they only lived and that those who made them icons or symbols, were us in many cases post mortem; that is to say, sometimes they were not valued by their time or culture, but by other times and other cultures.
Sometimes we are sold as part of immortality the fact of leaving a legacy, that is to say that we have to live in this or that way to do it, but is it fair that we sacrifice living our present to leave a legacy that may only be appreciated by later generations and that depends on the cultural values to which this legacy is subjected not to change, because if they do, then you would be leaving a heretic legacy, now if your happiness is the sacrifice of today in pursuit of a future legacy then do it, be happy because we are talking about living today and being happy today with what we have and what we do.
I hope you have enjoyed these crazy ramblings or blurts of a literary man.