June 12th, 2025.

 

Writing becomes an arduous task when all the words seem to disappear from you. No feeling of any nature inside, only the heart doing its biological function, also the lungs and all the organs, like a soulless machine.

Time to start, wake up, take a shower, eat something, preference something healthy, otherwise guilt raises. Workout to balance the stress or to feel alive and privileged, get dressed, go to work time to finish and repeat all over again, that is how the words are lost.

However, in some very tight spaces of that gearing, there are millimetres of flesh where blood still pulses, and intangible things are suspended in the air preventing the inexorable action of time. The atoms float peacefully, colours and meanings go arising, connecting to each other, and creating senses, sensations, touches, beauties, meanings, smiles, life itself in a different gravity.

Everyone has those millimetres where we hide and protect our essentials, our capsules of fresh air and wild horses to ease life’s callosity.

Writing to go beyond

 

My wife has just told me that writing a diary would be an excellent exercise for me. Indeed, it would be. I love writing, and I consider it a great exercise to look through words and find a reason or a meaning to the things I deal with or feel.

Writing guides me beyond what I am. Everyone wants to be more of what it really is. And to fill that gap there is the art and its multiple ways to enrich who we are. Art is necessary “because the world is not enough”. If the world is not enough, our nature demand to go beyond our cold and fragile logic.   

Inner dive

Recollections make us travel through time 

Encompass our horizon and a dive is made in our grandeur inner emotions 

Depending on our spirit of the mind, that journey may be loathsome and grief-stricken.  

Facing them is an arduous task, our first attempt is trying to annihilate them… 

Useless

They cannot be erased, in a certain way, we were shaped by them. 

Looking intently at what caused us pain and suffering and finding some learning is painful but also brings maturity. 

That is the path of the changeover. 

To be or not to be?

 I have been pondering on fathership for a long time. Considering my journey so far, I have decided to not have any kids. I am judged every time I express my position about the theme. However, as the adult man that I am, I have my reasons. 

First, I do not see myself as responsible enough to be responsible for other life, it terrifies me a lot. I am a forty-year-old man and have just started living my life as I always wanted just 5 years ago.  And what I wanted is not too much, I mean working hard as hell, saving some money, and travelling at least once a year. Many of you might consider what I have just mentioned as a lame excuse, but it is not for me. 

Second, this reason is more philosophical, and it is connected to the rest of the world. The world is a cruel place to be in, it is full of injustice, prejudice, and inequality. The majority are dying because of the greed of a few. I have never been prone to fathership. Sometimes, I wonder if my denial could not be a fear to make the same mistakes as my father. 

Even though my conditions to be a better father than my father was for me are huge, my musings on it are indubitably decided. What can I let to this world in an attempt to transform it into a better place? I do not know yet. A book? I did it, already. To plant a tree? Possible. A son? Not at all. I strongly believe that many contemporaries feel the same about fathership or mothership, however, this feeling remains in secret because of our Christian stifling hypocrisy. Amen. 

Painful Learning

 

There is no recipe to deal with the piercing absence that death causes in our existence.

Suddenly, a deep hole arises in our chest and everything concrete becomes just memory.

Suddenly there is no more touch, no more hugs, no more smiles or eyes crossing at each other…

Abruptly, our certainties fade up and that absence becomes as hard as the floor under our feet.

The heart gasps and life forces us to move forward…

Death explains, painfully, that life is fragile and that the end is as tangible as the possibility to disarm us of individualism and selfishness.   

Ironically death teaches us to live…

TEST?

What makes a ‘good’ test good? 

 The test is always a polemic issue, for some aspects must be considered, such as the school curricula, school policies and how teachers face tests because some face a test as a final product of a process, and others see the test as one part of a whole process.

Honestly, I strong disbelieve in tests as a final product of a process, especially because it creates a tense atmosphere in which nothing contributes to students’ learning process. As Stephen Krashen has suggested in his Affective filter hypothesis, students must be comfortable and confident during all the stages of the learning process, and feelings like anxiety and demotivation can block comprehensible input.

Krashen affirms that language is acquired through meaningful communicative interactions. That is the way I see how tests may be. First and foremost, a test is just one part of a whole process. I disbelieve in the reliability of a test in which students stay nervous and anxious before a piece of a paper, and sat for hours trying to find the correct answer. Language is dynamic and above everything is communication.

On top of that, teachers must find dynamic ways (games, quizzes, debates, interviews, etc.) to test their students. These ways must focus on letting the students be able to interact, at the same time, with other students and with the content. Currently, everything done in class prepare the students for tests, not exactly to acquire a language.

In other words, what is assessed traditionally could be done dynamically without tension and anxiety. However, school policies must be respected and followed because a teacher whose profile does not match the school policy is always a replaceable teacher. As I have discussed, my greatest struggle is dealing with some institutions that face the test as a final product of a process, disregarding that language is communication, not only an object to be studied.

 

Sparks of a humble reader

 

March 07, 2022.

 

Notes about “There is a difference” by Hans Christian Andersen.

 

These words are not literary criticism. They are only about the sparks that arise in a reader’s soul when a book, a short story, or a poem is read.

On top of that, reading the short story 'There is a difference' by Hans Christian Andersen made arise some sparks about empathy and selfishness. Two important feelings that, in some way or another, conjugate human actions throughout history.

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences by imagining what it would be like to be in that person’s situation. On the other hand, selfishness is the complete refusal of someone else’s feelings or experiences. However, the ironic fact about the latter is that still being a feeling of refusal of someone else’s feelings and experiences, it needs someone else to achieve what it needs. The difference is that it does not create bonds as empathy does.

In short, it is not a fault the Apple Tree Brach recognizes its beauty, but it is a mistake to imagine that the beauty depends exclusively on the Branch’s beauty. The exclusion starts from a limited view and ignores essential parts to understand the whole complexity of the garden. There is a difference indeed, but it is about perspective.

#hanschirstianandersen

#literature