Merry Christmas

Thanks to Daniel I decided to post something here. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve and I think it would be nice to have some message here.

Sometimes I am truly amazed with how people are so driven to always be successful in everything they do. I know success is important. But hey, what good would be light if there wasn’t the dark? A life based on success is, in my point of view, meaningless. If there’s nothing you can’t do, then why bother? We should always have something we are not able to accomplish, at least at first. That makes the taste of victory even better.

I know that from personal experience. In the last years I’ve been through a lot, achieved many victories and had many failures. Yeah, I’m not afraid of saying it. I failed. Thank god, I’m still human!

I have already posted a comment in your blog, Daniel. And I say it again: Success is a journey, not a destination. So stop running. I have to be honest: I got my BS, but I am quite aware that I don’t know or understand a lot of what I should have learned during my undergraduate times. It bothers me a lot more than I let show. Every now and then I wonder if I am going in the right direction, if I’m truly satisfied with the path I’ve been trailing. My conclusion is that, even if there were a few bad moments, weakness moments, there were also good moments, times when I was stronger than everything that worked against me and moved on. I persisted. I may not be the best of the best. But I do everything I can, I give my best because I like the sensation of accomplished work. Even if my best is not enough, I’m proud of it because it is my best.

I’m well aware of all my mistakes, and of all my vices. They are part of who I am, as much as my accomplishments and my virtues. It’s not settling for mediocrity. It’s accepting myself.

I could go on and on here, ranting and ranting, explaining myself until I went green. But I’d rather stop here, while I’m still making any sense.

So, it’s Christmas again. I still can’t believe a year has already passed since last year’s tumultuous ending – not the holidays, but the end of that semester, which almost beat me. I still find myself sometimes wondering how I didn’t go crazy with all the pressure and stress I went through those weeks. The good thing is, I did, and I graduated, and here I am, on to a next step. The bad thing is that, obviously, The pressure and stress didn’t go away – they just changed faces a bit. I have to say, though, that I deserve that. It’s been almost eight years since freshman and I still didn’t learn to organize myself to avoid getting myself in trouble in the end of semester. Until now, I maganed to escape. I just hope I learn my lesson before it’s too late.

Oh well. I went through a lot this year. But it’s still not the time for that – there’s a week left. I’ll work on a nice retrospective post about everything that happened this year…

Last, but not least, I finally would like to post a few words here about christmas, since this is my last post before Dec 25. I do not see this date as the mystic moment when God’s Son was born unto this Earth to save all of mankind, even if I believe that Jesus existed sometime in the past and was probably a very charismatic and intelligent (and maybe wise) man. I do celebrate christmas, though, in my own way. even if this date begun as a religious celebration, I think its significance is much more important: it’s the moment in the year when people remind themselves (or at least *should*) that they are not alone in this rock and that maybe they have something to do with it. That, even if we are just the result of evolutionary probability, here we are. We happened to achieve a state of awareness no other being in this planet was able to. We may not be the smartest of species, but intelligence is not the only pre-requisite for being human.

My message, though, is not the usual one. I do not think that people should get all together and be happy ever after. I don’t believe in fairy tales – I’m much more practical. I believe we are what we are today because of evolution – we followed the course of natural evolution, within certain boundaries, established by our environment and by a few random variables. Homo sapiens has a very distinguished state of awareness and sentience. Mankind, on the other hand, does not. It is the mixture of all human beings, and as such, it is just like other mixtures. People are very different, even if we are the same species. It’s just like adding up a lot of different musical instruments. Without a maestro, there’s no chance a music will come up from the mess. That’s mankind: an orchestra that tries to play a song without a maestro. Well, maybe not completely without one: our environment is a kind of maestro. We play what we see and hear and feel.

Every single person is an instrument. And every instrument has a defined role in an orchestra. I doubt everyone has ever seen the violinist trying to tell the pianist how to play his piano; we’re just the same. These days, people are so concerned about the others that they forget themselves; they become lost in collectivity and forget individuality.

If every person took more care about her own life, the world would be a better place. I’m not saying we should simply ignore other people. I’m saying the exact opposite of that: our maestro is what surrounds us. People should pay attention to everyone around them. It’s through seeing what happens around us that we trace our own road to the future.