Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Forgiveness, the foundation of serenity.


To my parents, who taught me the ways of forgiveness.
Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, English philosopher and essayist (1561-1626), said that "revenge makes us like the enemy; forgiveness makes us superior to him."
Throughout history, forgiveness has been extolled by religions and philosophies, atheists and Christians, and especially desired by sages. It is said that you need to forgive to move forward. But it is not easy to understand why forgiveness is so essential in life, or to believe that there is no peace without forgiveness. Apparently, so much exaltation seems to make forgiveness an overvalued concept. Is it so?
The truth is that every human being seeks forgiveness at some point: either to be forgiven or to have to forgive the mistakes, hurts, harsh words, incisive gestures, foolish attitudes, thoughtless behaviors, abrupt departures, violent ruptures, absenteeism, resentments, hidden anger, forbidden desires...
Eventually, you must forgive yourself, well before forgiving others.
Some people are unable to forgive and go through life accumulating grievances and generating intense and unnecessary suffering. Spiteful people are always unhappy people. The smaller the ability to forgive, the greater the inevitability of misery.
To make a brief analogy: people are like houses. Over the years they keep things inside, filling the memory with images and emotions. The lack of forgiveness causes them to keep grudges, grievances, sadness, anger – the garbage of emotions, and just like a home that is filled with random useless objects, the light goes out and places become dark, ugly and untidy.
Forgiveness is a kind of wind which airs everything inside, it is a redeeming light. It is the equivalent to throwing out everything that is bad to create new and spacious interiors. It is like the sun that enters through the windows to illuminate everything and cast away the darkness.
But the paths to forgiveness are violent, painful, slow and difficult. Because forgiveness is an act of love coming straight from the heart, in situations where the heart is filled with everything but love, in hours when anger, hatred, resentment and hurt fill the heart.
In order to forgive it is necessary, first of all, to want to forgive. You need to touch wounds, and sometimes to open them again. Forgiving is not forgetting. It is a state prior to forgetting: it is when the memory is still raw, and there is pain, anger and resentment - that is when it becomes vital to forgive. And we know that forgiveness is necessary precisely because there is pain - when you forgive the pain goes away.
Forgiveness is essential for a happy future. There is no future without forgiveness. Those who do not forgive become prisoners of the past, feeding what is the cause of their suffering and just allowing people who have hurt them to continue participating in their life.
Forgiveness is freeing up, it is to be greater than the hurt and bitterness, it is to have control over your emotions. It is to find the best in you, to be noble and to overcome the easy feelings of anger and resentment. Forgiveness is the opposite of humiliation, insult, screaming. It is a sincere and silent gesture, which should not be flaunted – just like generosity. Forgiving depends solely on each and every one of us and it is what makes the pain lighter, the errors smoother, the anger softer and the enemies tamer.
Juan Luis Vives
Mahatma Gandhi
Forgiveness is what divides men into superior and inferior beings. Juan Luis Vives, the Spanish humanist of the XVI century (1492-1540), said that "to forgive is typical of the very generous of spirits, but to hold a grudge is a thing of harsh, cruel, low caste and poor men."
Because of all this, forgiveness is not overvalued. It is the foundation of serenity, and a gesture of true freedom and strength. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948) argued that "the weak never forgives, forgiveness is one of the features of the strong."

Change, a new beginning.


Moving home is always an adventure: some love it, others hate it. Some consider it an opportunity, others a crisis. Some sense the future, others cling to the past. What is certain is that change should not be seen as something capable of arousing anger, attachment or grief. It should be seen as a way to rethink life, sort things, assess what is valued and should continue and what should be left behind.
As with all changes, moving house is very symbolic. This is not a simple transfer of objects from one place to another. This is about disheveling the whole house, making visible what was invisible, sticking your hands in your whole life, and trying to fit everything into boxes. It's stumbling across things that lead back to your childhood, to that person we love so much, and to that other person who seemed so important, but fell apart in time, it’s stumbling across your children’s clothing from when they were babies and fit into your arms ... This is to look back and see our life told in objects, in books, in random notes.
We tend to resist change, whatever it may be: we like - and need - our comfort zone our house tidied in a certain way, the objects laid with an almost definite order, people we take for granted by our side, gestures we repeat and transform into rituals to put the days in order.
But sometimes change comes. Sudden. Abrupt. Greedy. It imposes itself upon us, without giving room for us to adjust to it. There is never time to understand change. First we must accept it. The more we hate or resist change, the more it hurts us. It's as if it possessed a mechanism that is triggered when it encounters any resistance. Change seems to enjoy soft bodies - those that bend but do not break. To survive change we have to be soft. And perhaps that's what it shows us: when we think we're safe, restful, change appears to remind us that life is bigger, higher, and it asks for more, it wants us meek.
To change - home, marital status, employment and profession - is an act of courage. It's a new opportunity to avoid mistakes we already know, to improve ourselves, to start walking on other paths, to let go of what we do not want, to choose what really matters.
To pack boxes - real ones or symbolic ones - is a necessary step to move forward. Life gives us many new beginnings. This is not about forgetting the past or erasing mistakes. We are who we are precisely because we have a unique path made up of errors as well as accomplishments. But we can start over as many times as we want, and it's always another step to learning.
We fix the new home knowing where to hang the pictures we like the most. We seek the places where the light hits to put the plants. We reorganized the details, and crystal glasses are at hand to drink that wine with our loved ones. We tidy up our home the same way we arrange our life: we paint the walls with happy colors, we line our sofas with fine fabrics and our cabinets with tissue paper, we make impossible objects fit in tiny spaces, we leave a room empty for the things of the future. We are creative!
We come to places with a clean heart, after we’ve dumped the undesirable excesses. We come ready for other people, other moments of our lives. We have arrived!
Change is a new beginning!

Memory is what persists in us...


The things and objects that we store and accumulate over the years are worth for their purpose, but also for their symbolic meanings.
We keep clothes - of all ages – hoping we’ll dress them again one day, when we lose weight or when it is fashionable again. We keep our notebooks from school, when our handwriting was still in its infancy, and then we add to the pile, our children’s notebooks. We keep boxes and boxes filled with objects because they remind us something, or because they were a gift from someone we like. We keep objects from someone who departed, far away or forever, as if we could preserve a piece of that person with us. We keep broken crockery and furniture, waiting for the time when we will retrieve them, waiting for a time that we don’t have nor will we ever have. We keep letters and notes, magazines, yellowed books with their diluted print and indistinct phrases...
We keep completely useless things that lose their original meaning and fail to refer us to any place or memory. But we keep them. We keep them in order to have a sense of security, continuity, permanence! We keep them to fight against forgetfulness, but this is a paradox: if we need an object to remember an event or someone it is because we have already forgotten them!
And there comes a time when the cupboards are full of stored things - from our childhood, our children’s, our grandchildren’s, our grandparents’! Closets, garages and attics crammed with things that will never be remembered, touched, used or useful!
But when the time to donate comes, the time to get rid of that pile of junk that the objects turned into, that memory comes back, that treacherous memory that takes us to the past. And all the memories come to life, as if suddenly they had woken up. And rather than fixing them or donating them, we get stuck with the memories that each object will awaken in us and, in the end, it all comes back to pile up in the same place. We shut the closets, garages and crammed attics, and keep everything again - as if the objects were our life, everything we lived and lost in the past. We cling to objects to avoid releasing the past, for fear that when they are gone, a piece of us will also go, and will become dilute and lost.
It is true that we are connected to everything that we have by a sort of invisible umbilical cord. The objects must be like children - at some point we have to let them go, to go on existing elsewhere, and so that we can continue with our lives.
When we bind the objects - to us – everything becomes cluttered, dusty, occupying a space that should be aired and filled with new things, new experiences, a new life...
We must rid ourselves of things we do not use, of everything that we do not want, and create a scope in our lives - open spaces to flood with light. Things do not mean anything after a certain time - they have already served their purpose. We have to let them go! What resists and persists in us is the memory!

Monday, October 29, 2012

The angels we envy, the wings we desire...


There something about wings that seduces us...
We admire the beauty of the birds and their ability to reach heights that disturb us. The wisdom of soaring in the wind, and reach other destinations, forbidden to us. Sometimes we desire their wings. But we do not envy them with the same force, the same intensity, the same deep desire with which we envy the angels.
Angels belong to a category of beings inhabiting a fantasy world that stirs our imagination - angels, fairies, winged horses...
And among all the winged beings, those who we really envy are the angels, with their impossible flights. Not sexless angels who guard our childhood, but the disturbed angels full of contradictions and desires, the angels who must struggle constantly to maintain the purity and rise above the human temptations that seem to persist within them.
We envy those angels who can balance themselves between the human and the divine. The violent angels who punish us with their perfect hands. The loving angels who love us with their sculptural bodies. The vigilant angels who watch us with their wide wings.
We envy those angels because we - humans - are all fallen angels, expelled from a lost and promised paradise, a paradise that nowadays blends with the sky. And what hurts us is the memory of the wings we have lost. And the desire to fly still persists in us, and we are left with the memory of flight in our earthly inability to fly.
Man's struggle is a struggle for height – for the sky. It's a struggle for his interior height, because the sky represents the best, the purest, the happiest, the most serene. Man struggles to rise, to fly!
We are the ones who build heaven and hell - in this life, every day! And the impossible wings of angels are our metaphor. They bring us closer to the sky when they grow white and bright, or closer to hell when they scorch themselves and burn in a precipitous drop - like the legend of Icarus.
And we come closer to the angels when we conquer our demons, whenever we become better people - in this or that small gesture. We are able to fly whenever we choose to keep our dreams alive. And we fly, we really fly, when we fall in love – our feet barely touch the ground and the mind becomes blurred with the essence of clouds. And this is the most real memory we have of our angelic wings!

Friday, October 26, 2012

Love, the balance of wills.




To Paulo, my balance.

A relationship is, among other things, the search for the delicate balance of two wills. It is the meeting of two people who strive to walk together, in the same direction. It is the creation of a new energy. It is, among other things, a continuous negotiation between affection and power - the invention of a new place where the limits of both, affection and power, are tested.
And there is nothing more dangerous and destructive in a relationship than to transform love in a struggle for power: when one wants to beat the other, when one wants to dominate the other, when one wants to impose on the other - at any price, in any circumstance.
When love and power collide, it distorts the essence of affection: love becomes the springboard for a battle of wills and not to a settling of wills. And what is measured in this fight is the strength, the ability to subjugate another, to force him to accept our own truths and desires.
The beginning of love opens the way for people to meet and reinvent themselves, to find out who they are and how they are to the other, to establish a foundation of respect - because it is the respect that allows us to live with the similarities and to accept the differences. But it is over the years - side by side - that people are able to overcome themselves, to amaze each other, to take care of each other, to create a truly intimacy, to create spaces where words, silences and wills are balanced around a center thread of tenderness.
What makes a loving relationship unique and special is the possibility for two beings to become one, not just through the body but also through the soul. However, if the power invades the daily agenda of a relationship, transforming the situations in strength training, people become worse human beings - more aggressive, more primitive and far less generous. These are terrible relationships when one exacerbates the worst characteristics of the other’s! Love is not for that: its main capability is to make people better, softer, more serene and undoubtedly more beautiful.
The power has everything to do with ego, pride and arrogance, love has everything to do with altruism, beauty and elevation. The power overshadows the future, love brightens it. The power is based on relationships of subordination, love in relationships of equality.
Power crushes love because it is a conquest of territory, a search for completely irrelevant victories that do not lead anywhere and that only show an empty exercise of false strength. Because the real power lies not in subordinating to the other, but to accept him, to give him room to flourish, let him find his own glow and sometimes to make him shine.
Power is stigma, the mark of brutality. Love is the exercise of the virtuous.
Power is heavy and dark. Love is light as champagne and it transforms people into bright beings like those luminescent fish that glow in the deep sea, as if lighted by a lamp inside them.
Power and love are strange territories, from different countries. They are parallel languages that do not meet: power is the exercise of strength and love is the exercise of tenderness.

Envy, the evil side of desire.


We want what we do not have, and that is what drives us and makes fight to build a brighter and happier future, to be better and wiser people.
We feed desires, and when one comes true it is immediately replaced by another. It is part of human nature - that continued ability to generate dreams, desires, of not having empty spaces inside of us. Desires allow us to design the future and move forward.

We hunt happiness as if we were hunting chimeras - as if happiness were a mythological animal that we may never reach. And when we finally find it, we petrify with the fear of losing it - treating it as something borrowed, that an envious being may steal from us at any time. Since antiquity envy is that misshapen shadow that threatens happiness.
It is associated to the eye and that’s why the belief in the 'evil eye' persists. It is believed that the 'evil eye' is caused by envy - conscious or unconscious. And it is said that envy, which comes by looking, has a destructive force capable of annihilating the happiness and well-being, capable of causing damage to the thing or person that is the target of frustrated desire. To assign to the third parties the cause of misery or unhappiness is also an old behavior, although it is an exaggeration! However, it is certain that all feelings are energy, and the kind of feeling - whether it is positive or negative - is what gives form to that energy. And envy is a negative energy that triggers equally negative reactions. "Schadenfreude" is a German concept that holds that the envious take pleasure in the pain of the person envied. And sometimes they even cause that pain.
There is no such thing as good envy! Envy is the bad and unspeakable side of desire.
Envy is the intense desire for something that we do not possess, that it is not ours, but that we wish were ours. Envy is a heavy word, which refers to ugly and destructive feelings. Greed is born of immoderate desire for something material or not. At its origin, envy meant “walk in the other person's spiritual step- the walk was based on the efforts of others. Currently, envy is reminiscent of that initial concept.
And what is the difference between desire and envy? Both seem to have the same root, the same source - born in the same place. What makes desire acceptable and envy despicable?
Desire is the wish to have something, but with your own effort, it is to look at your future and fill it with good things. Envy is to look at your friends, neighbors, colleagues, and want to have things or qualities that they possess.
Desire does not cause anger, wrath. It starts and ends in itself: when you do not get what you want, it generates no resentment, no suffering. You do not think about it anymore. That moment ends and does not return to haunt us.
Envy is different: it generates hatred when you cannot get what you want. It creates an inexplicable and overwhelming feeling of hatred towards the person envied. Envy is associated with anger without reason: the rage of someone owning something that we really want but that is not ours, something that does not belong to us!
Desire is yearning for a wonderful future, but it is also wanting others to succeed, be well, be happy, have better wages, have a great life! Envy is feeling uncomfortable with the success and joy of others, it is to silently wish that they end up badly, to be happy with their problems, and not to stand their having a better life!
For Buddhists envy arises from the combination of two words: one which means greed and another which means jealousy. And it's a feeling that prevents spiritual evolution and blocks the path to enlightenment.
We must rise up to overcome envy and the hideous feelings it arouses - anger, bitterness, revenge. Envy is the right path to a future of unhappiness!
It takes courage to know when to stop and choose which desires to feed, which futures to plant and plan. You need tranquility to create a calm silence - within yourself - immune to the constant noise of always wanting more. It takes wisdom to be beyond greed, envy, and tread the paths of enlightenment.

Generosity, a divine spark.


Being generous is something very elegant! It has an elevated quality, inherent to people who have attained a high spiritual level!
Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Warren Buffett (investor), George Lucas (filmmaker) and Oprah Winfrey (TV host) are just some of the billionaires involved in philanthropic campaigns. But donating is only part of generosity: it is the most visible part, even when people wish to remain anonymous. Many who donate do not like to reveal their identity, because generosity only acquires its full meaning when it is coupled with discretion.
Generosity is an individual choice, of the private sphere: no one is obligated to give anything to anyone; no one is obligated to donate what took so long to achieve and get. But giving is a principle that enlarges the soul and makes people better - because when we donate something, we also donate a piece of us! Generosity is an interior and an exterior donation: besides helping the world with what we don’t need, what we do not lack, it is also an attitude that shows the true nature of people. So generosity you want to be quiet, discreet: no one needs to know what we donate or whom we donate to! This is part of what being elegant means!
But generosity is more than donating material goods. It carries some almost invisible traits, imperceptible behaviors that are, in most cases, essential to humanity, although they are basic behaviors. Generosity belongs to the world of educated, polished feelings, alongside with delicacy and gentleness.
And what is generosity beyond material donations?
It is to accept others without judgment, with a clean soul.
It is to stop being centered in your own world, talking about travelling, money, prices, brands, and show what you have and what you have done. It's to get out of your world and venture into the world of others with care and delicacy.
It is to look people in the eye, to give them a voice, and to listen to them - even those who are on the streets and that we so often pretend are invisible, that we do not see! They, some of these invisible beings, could be us - devoid of homes, unemployed, caught in the swirls of an economic crisis, which have the ability to sweep continents, and drag whole families into the black holes of the global economy.
It's to quietly extend the hand not only to unknown people but also to those we know, those who are next to us - because it always seems easier, safer, less threatening to help unknown people - the others - those of distant countries. It should not be so!
It is an inspirational light that comes from within, and that must be cultivated - daily. It is the ability to let others shine, is to give space to others, it is to stop being egocentric, it is to stop using the word 'I' and instead use the word 'we'. Generosity is what turns people into leaders!
It is the basic principle of solidarity - that broader donation that comes directly from the spirit! It is a divine spark that persists in humans, and that causes them to be more pure and better.