The house: our second skin.

There are people who live in the same house all their lives; they know by heart all the hinges, the scratched paint, and the wood weaknesses. There are others that change house regularly: living here today and there tomorrow and hardly take the time to know the house they inhabit.

There are people who love to stay in their homes, savoring every small detail, and there are others who cannot stand being at home. They wake up in the morning and their first thought is about going out, and when they come to the end of the day it is simply to sleep.

The relationship with the house reveals a great deal about our personality! It might be thought that extroverts like to live away from home, and introverts like to stay home. But it is not necessarily so: the house is a kind of cocoon, the place for personal transformation and stillness. The house is a place to rest, to replenish energies, to quiet the mind in search of balance, to find serenity, to listen to the voice that whispers new ways and warns against the dangers. The house is our second skin! That’s why it is this so difficult to live in a house: it is where we reveal ourselves without any kind of defenses. It’s where we walk barefoot, in pajamas covering our warm skin, with disheveled hair, drinking a glass a wine on a much bigger glass than your hand, curled up on the couch like a cat, with our heads tilted at an odd angle to read the legends of a Polish film… The house is where we undress our body and soul.

It doesn’t matter whether the house is temporary or not, the important thing is to turn it into “our” place while we are there. So, in our house we should only allow people we like, people we love, people that make us feel good, people that take us plants and affection to wish us good luck, people to take us soup when we have the flu!

It doesn’t matter whether the house is large or small, whether it is sophisticated or simple. It matters that it has a certain order and the objects and clothes are tidy, because it is that order that makes the houses our own.

You don’t have to enjoy being at home, but it is fundamental to know how to stay at home. This allows us to know who we are; to take a moment to rethink ourselves, to recognize changes and desires, to expose weaknesses, to rest the body of daily battles. Any warrior knows when it's time to fight and when it’s time to be quiet, when it's time to run and when it’s time to stop running and when it is time to go to battle and when it’s time to go back home! Any warrior knows that his home is a safe place to rest and grow stronger!

Delicacy, the thread of civility.

Delicacy establishes a coexisting platform that separates the living world, roughly, into two portions – one belonging to the rude people and another to the educated.

Rude people are the course, the ignorant, and the uncouth. They confuse strength with rudeness and bad manners. They cross other people’s path - physically or symbolically. They invade places uninvited; they meddle in other people's lives. Rude people are clueless.

The educated are the cultured, the civilized, and the true thinkers. The educated are those who, in any event, can keep their unalterable sweetness, as if they were beings who did not mingle with the unpleasant earthly affairs. The educated are the delicate people.

Being delicate is almost an anachronism, a stubborn recollection from the past. It is a virtually unrecognizable feature these days. Most people do not even know what delicacy means, and confuse it with femininity. But delicacy is a trait of the soul; it is a refinement of education. Delicacy is gentleness, care, elegance, refinement, perfection, courtesy, kindness. Delicacy is also frailty - a characteristic of fine porcelains, tasteful crystals, and of the sensitive and beautiful things.

Being delicate can be as sharp as a sword! Being delicate imposes itself naturally, without noise: there’s no need to raise your voice, wrangle, gesture wildly or make a scandal. Delicacy overrides everything – it creates its own space. It subjugates people. It smashes the brute – people with no education and a crude spirit.

We can tell that the world has been invaded by a race of rude people, who are leading humankind back to the caves. In an era where technology could elevate humankind, make it better, more cultured and educated - because information is a single click away - there comes a way back to barbarism, but not a barbarism of survival, dominated by hunting and combating the dangers of wild nature. It is a worse kind of barbarism – it’s the barbarism of the soul! We are dealing with the exchange of excellence for mediocrity, brutality for civility, of education for lack of good manners.

We must get delicacy back: make relationships elegant, refine the spirit, and redeem the soul. Delicacy is a kind of code with subtle rules that are almost imperceptible when they are applied, but they become glaring when they are not carried out. For most mortals these rules mean nothing, but they should mean something: without them we are in the domain of the shadows, in the realm of the brute.

Delicacy reveals a world of small silences, where one does not speak too much to be able to listen to the other; where one is aware of the signs and gestures to establish an elegant language where you don’t have to say everything; where one does not speak ill of other people's lives nor exposes the privacy of personal life; where one dresses soberly without exposing the intimacies of the body; where one is not late for appointments; where one reads good books to enrich the spirit and not to show publicly; where one does not numerate the benefits - not who you know nor what you do.

Delicacy is the endless world of discretion, and is in the delicacy that the strength lies - when a word is sharper than a cry and civility outweighs barbarism.

The B side of life: do not simply survive, thrive.

A few years ago a friend gave me an excellent article written by George Hutchinson, in Executive Focus. The article addressed a theme - increasingly more relevant - that listed time, attitude and success and began by saying basically this: organized executives do not measure their success by the hours they spend working!

The profile of the incredibly successful executives reveals that they are quiet, very organized and they have as main objective to achieve a simple and very difficult concept: how to achieve more in less time. The success of their careers is measured primarily by the success of their personal lives.

Hutchinson offers several examples: Michael Eisner, CEO of Disney, refused to work late when he had an arrangement with his children; Lucy Fisher, vice president of Columbia TriStar Motion Pictures, worked four days a week and spent Friday with her family; John Malone, the telecommunications tycoon, worked five hours a day and ate lunch at home; Jill Barad, the energetic President of Matell, religiously watched her favorite television series in the company of her husband and children.

All these people have enormous responsibilities, but they make time for their family, leisure, hobbies and the personal satisfaction of their goals.

How do they achieve this? Contrary to what one might think, it is not because they had lots of assistants and secretaries, but because they use various techniques that simplify their lives and make their work more efficient.

The demands of today's world are becoming larger and more pressing: computer problems, trips, issues with employees, meetings, interruptions, deadlines, information overload - stacks of files, letters and emails. All this makes professionals suffer from a ruthless demand for their time. And this situation will only get worse. But we start to realize that there is a gradual tendency for people to invest in the B side of life - do more in less time, to have more free time.

Efficient management is becoming - for a growing quota of professionals - a priority to improve job performance and, consequently, the quality of personal life.

Many executives thrived in their careers - and improved their lives – by learning to delegate decisions, improve interpersonal relationships, deal with the habit of postponing things and overwork (workaholism) - among other challenges.

There are several techniques to help professionals achieve their goals, but the key word is organization. Many people are unhappy in their work, but few make the connection between part of their unhappiness and clutter - it can become unbearable to the best of jobs and it is relatively easy to fix.

Executives and successful people manage their lives, instead of being controlled by their lives!

Nowadays success is the time spent doing what you want, what you wish to do!

Dreams, the sixth knowledge.

To my son, Lourenço.

Dreams are made of a strange substance, which touches and unites several worlds: we dream when we sleep and dream when we are awake.

To the first kind of dreams, the dreams of our sleep we ascribe healing powers and premonitory capabilities. They are a door through which fears and demons are cast out, and through which we envision the future. Who knew that when we sleep we push out what disturbs us, and we see scattered pieces of tomorrow?

To the latter kind of dreams, the dreams of our waking days, we attribute the ability to invent the future. They form a kind of individual hope, a force that keeps our eyes locked onto the horizon. Who knew those whispers that insist on showing us tenuous futures, are possible paths?

Movie Tekkonkinkreet, manga de Taiyo Matsumoto

Dreams are like the clouds: moving quickly in the sky – night and day, traveling to and from, and occasionally they rain upon us and shower us with brilliant ideas and slow premonitions.

Sometimes their whispers can be confused with intuition, but they are of a totally different nature! They have a lighter density, and their geography is broader and flatter.

Intuition is the sixth sense, and dreams are the sixth knowledge!

Dreams live outside of us and inside of us. They are a kind of jam that blends itself with our bones, our blood, and wanders through our body as a curious visitor.

They are often swallowed by the noise of everyday life – our dreams and the world’s dreams – and we barely notice their existence. But they are still there, dormant, pressed into our neuroses. And they resist our neglect for a long time, until one day they melt like snowflakes and disappear.

And after they are gone, they leave a void behind, an absence of hope, a sense of sad complacency that quenches the horizon. Then we realize that the dreams are gone, because the nights become darker and the days become gloomier! 

Everything got inexplicably darker.

Dreams go away, but they come back, they resist, they persist, they persevere...

It takes very little to feed them: colorful words, kind gestures, children, balloons, cats flying, the sea, chocolate cakes, art, sugar almonds, the beach, the color green – dreams seem to like green, but on certain days they prefer yellow, blue, red...

They have an invisible connection to the future that seem to make them grow: tomorrows, spaces, astronauts, hopes, the era of the Aquarius!

Dreams live in the phrase “when I grow up...”, “when I get…”! They live in laughter and affection! They live in each one of us, and in the ingenuity to think about tomorrow - to believe in tomorrow.

Dreams are the gaseous matter that wanders through the galaxies, and they remind us that we are the future, and that our future lies in the talent we have to believe in bright and impossible futures - in futures of overmatch.

Dreams are the prelude to faith. They dissolve in our body like sugar dissolves in milk, and they sweeten us!

Urgent ... is to be happy!

There is a tendency – continuous and ever growing - for people to think that everything is urgent. Everything is for yesterday - as if today only serves to chase the time spent.

In most cases, the deadlines fall upon us mercilessly, demanding personal sacrifices in order to be met. And often, we find, after spending several sleepless nights, that which has kept us awake is no longer important - for our customers, for our bosses, or whoever put us in that untenable situation of subduing time that is almost always invincible.

There is a clear connection between the urgent nature of things and the things of the ego: many find that the more urgent is the task at hand, the more important people they are. And this supposed urgency seems to give them the right to invade our lives, anytime, interrupting our sleep, late at night, on Saturdays and on Sundays... Perhaps because their personal lives are empty and lonely. They forget that there are a lot of happy people. A bunch of people occupied with the sum of their affections and their chores.

This modern urgency only tends to get worse, with the increasing hunger for immediacy, and the need to want everything now, which worsens with the online world. And it is easy to recognize the prisoners of this virtual world - busy with their phones or tablets, as if they were always doing something important, as trivial as it is. They have a latent nervousness that they express in the vacant and restless look in the eyes. And they are very clumsy in their nervousness!

Today everything is urgent, but almost nothing is urgent. The urgent things of today are exactly the same as always!

Thousands and thousands of things remain that are not urgent, but we let ourselves be imprisoned by these modern false emergencies - the idea that if things are not done at that time - at that exact and precious moment - something terrible might happen! But what can happen that might be so terrible? Really terrible? Nothing! Nothing happens! Literally nothing!

These false emergencies often are a reflection of personal neuroses. A reflection of attention-hungry egos, egos wanting to be important, but they are just sad.

There are few urgent things, truly urgent things.

Urgent is the struggle to save a life!

This is the case of surgeons, especially cardiac surgeons. Those who hold the heart of people in their hands like little gods, those who give life back with their hidden gifts, often beyond pure technique! These beings deal with urgency on a daily basis, and there's nobody more serene than them - well, maybe just the monks, but they do not mingle with the common dilemmas, nor do they have beating hearts in their quiet hands.

Urgent is to be happy! Urgent is kissing those we love and watch over our children’s sleep - because time has in itself an urgency that makes everything unrepeatable, it takes away everything, it drags us through life whether we like it or not. And we are here for this - to live this life, measured by the love we give, because that's what will keep us alive in the memory of the living.

The 20% who love us are worth more than the 20% who hate us.

Gui, psychoanalyst for over twenty years, traded Latin America for Europe, and abandoned psychoanalysis – for good. He told me he was sick of hearing other people's problems and the job was making him run out of patience.

It was he who told me the theory of the 20%.

According to this theory, 20% of people we meet immediately hate us for no reason! The unfathomable reasons for this rejection are incomprehensible both for them and for us - the hated.

In Brazil, when people feel an instant dislike it is said that their “saints are not compatible”. This means that the saints responsible for the protection of both people do not get along for some reason that escapes us.

In the rest of the world the “theory that the Saints are not compatible” is unknown; and we have to stop blaming the saints for small human dramas, and accept the harsh reality that, out of ten people two will detest us or hate us. And if we begin to project this number, we realize that in each group of one thousand people, two hundred hate us! Statistically, those 20% are lost to us! They are irretrievable.

But there is good news: at the opposite end of the scale, there are 20% who like us, also for no apparent reason, without any plausible explanation! And at this point, the equation finally equilibrated, when the number of detractors equals the number of admirers.

But there is in us an almost natural tendency to focus more on those who hate us - we think about them the most, we wonder about the reasons that lead them to hate us, and sometimes, it even causes us some pain. Rejection causes us more damage and consumes more of our time than acceptance does. The negative loiters for longer than positive. Criticisms linger longer in the memory than flattery.

And in fact it should be the opposite.

Instead of worrying about those who reject us, it would be better to focus on those who love us - freely. They are 20% - exactly the same percentage of those who hate us.

Why should we focus our thoughts and our energies on those 20% who hate us? What is it to us that they detest us? It was not our choice! We already have to deal with the 20% that we hate - and we need to rid ourselves of these negative feelings quickly to not get in the way of our painstaking spiritual climb. To hate someone generates a brutal amount of energy, an energy that we need to transform before it returns to us in this eternal cycle of return and transformation.

That which we give is what we get, and what comes out of us is who we are!

Acceptance should consume more of our time than rejection. The positive should remain in us more than the negative. Praise should outweigh criticism.

Love should weigh infinitely more than anger, hatred or grudge.

So the 20% who love us are worth more than the 20% who hate us.

The price of age is to be happier, but it takes courage!

Being mature should always mean that one is happier! No one reaches forty, and then fifty – and enter through the years without choosing to be happier. And being happy is a conscious choice, shaped by the small everyday decisions. Being happy is a cumulative process, it is like building a ladder – every day we add a step.

Age gives us wisdom to appreciate what good we have, that around which happiness thrives. And what is that?

- The greatest love that rescues us from a meaningless life, of frantic gestures, of dark thoughts and of everyday madness. Love is the seed, the core of happiness.

- The affections, which are the tribes that we have chosen. Living with people you care about is the second conscious step to happiness. We exclude all others; all others we cast out from our circle of the chosen ones, and even from our Facebook.

- Forgiveness, which is the equivalent of “cleaning” the heart. We clean our house so many times, with such manic energy, and we forget to clean our heart! And the heart is the vital organ of happiness.

- Hope, which is the bright thread that unites present and future. It works like a kind of Ariadne's thread that lets us discover the right path, even when everything is black around us.

Age also lets us know what we do not want, and gives us the courage to delete it from our lives! Churchill said that courage “is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.” I do not know if the courage is learned – I have rarely heard of “learning to be brave”', but I’ve always heard of “being brave”.

Being is an intrinsic quality, which is part of the character – to be brave, to be honest, to be anything ... So to be brave seems to be an inborn trait that pushes us forward even when we are terrified.

In order to be happy we must be brave! This is the basic requirement for happiness! It takes courage to take risks, to choose, to overcome, to move forward, to say no and to say yes ... It takes courage!

Please, don´t!

I went with two friends to ante-premiere of “Fiddler on the roof” - wonderful play, with a magnificent José Mayer, even for me, who wasn’t a big fan of his style up until then! While we were waiting for the beginning of the play, in the bustling lobby of the Alpha theatre (São Paulo), we were watching the atmosphere. It was not something I felt like doing, nor do I have this habit particularly developed, but try as I might, I could not help noticing the exuberant clothes. It was an excruciating exercise that made me realize that there are basic principles that should not and cannot be ignored! I'll list them, without any particular order...

- Elegance is in the simplicity: the more complicated the garments, the worse the outcome, and this is always inversely proportional.

- Less is always more: also known as the “Christmas tree effect”, it contradicts the idea that accessories serve to balance the figure, causing women to be overshadowed by them. This principle also applies to makeup, which should be used to enhance features, not hide them. Anything in excess is not sexy.

- When less is not more: micro clothes – mini / micro skirts, micro-shorts, micro-dresses –are embarrassing. Anything that is micro is macro embarrassing!

- No one is immune to the years, but the addiction to youth must not go through the use of micro clothes – these are clothes that potentiate the effect of age, making the difference between the face and body more explicit.

- Young women have a decision to make: if they chose to wear micros they should not fight constantly to pull them down, trying to stretch a fabric that does not stretch. It’s not nice.

- Micro-shorts have an aggravating factor: they are casual clothes far more appropriate for the beach or similar places, rather than watching a play.

- The tight and the sin: there is a category of tight clothes and some fabrics, that are a sin to wear, and should be avoided at any age.

- Clothes that are too tight reveal more than they should, and even in sculptural women, they give them a touch of vulgarity. But if women are not skinny, then the sin is even greater.

- Satin is also a sin. It is an enemy of women except those who have perfect bodies. It is a fabric that marks and reveals the undesirable, although it works nicely in slightly wider and more comfortable pajamas.

- The body of crime: exposing the body is a risk that must be carefully calculated - nobody wants to find out everything about a woman before even the first date. And the public space is not a doctor’s office! I still do not understand what is the relationship between showing your body and improve your self-esteem, although I believe that the lower the self-esteem, the greater the exposure of the body.

- Cellulitis should be a private drama. And it's not because almost all women have cellulite, even younger ones, that we should show it to the world. Let us leave it to the beach, which is already dramatic enough.

- The stomach should only be shown if accompanied by a modeled waist. The low waist fashion deformed the body, and created a kind of wave at the hip. To expose the belly, with its folds over the pants, is not stylish.

- High heels: to wear high heels you need a straight posture, soft and safe steps. Lightness is the key word. There is nothing less sexy than a woman with very high shoes, stomping, wobbling and believing herself to be the greatest. I am so sorry, but that is not the greatest! It is far better to opt for lower heels that allow to walk safely and gracefully.

- Secret places: Handbags and clutch bags are accessories where women keep their little secrets and some mystery. They should be adapted to situations.

- Bags shouldn’t be bigger than the wearer. This hippie thing of looking for a lost object in the bag, in the midst of a crowd, passes an image of disorganization. No one should be swallowed by their own bag! Big bags are for the beach or to go shopping - and they depend on the design.

- Clutch bags demand an attitude. Who chooses a clutch bag has to know how to wear it. You cannot keep it in your hand - aimlessly, turning it around or constantly changing position as if it had something burning your fingers.

- Colors that scream: very strong colors or excessively colored patterns, is another wrong way to draw attention. Sober colors are always the best option: they are classics. The bigger the person the more restrained should the colors be.

- The interior visible: to show your underwear is a thing of the eighties, which should not even have existed. Nobody should be forced to see somebody else’s underwear – unless they want to, of course. The bra and panties belong to a category called “underwear' - for a reason.

- To innovate, only safely: to experiment new looks in days of public exhibition, parties, weddings and other events, is inadvisable. To modernize or change requires a test drive - adaptation time needed not to look like a fish out of water.

The drama is that usually a person commits not one of these errors, but several - and at the same time. PLEASE DON’T!