This change is different
“A culpa é tua se dizes sempre
o mesmo nome
se tens sempre a mesma idade
e a mesma casa, se quando
revelas a tua identidade
é impossível que o céu te exploda
e que te acudas de incertezas
e de novos buracos.
A culpa é tua se ainda não
morreste, se nunca te
atrincheiraste à espera
de uma bomba que te mude os olhos
se nasces sempre no mesmo dia.
Não te aflijas.
Estás sempre a tempo de não
dormires na mesma posição
(com a mão aberta em esmola).
Também me custa
sobreviver a estes dias
mas o que ainda não chegou
é infinito.”
I have found a place, temporary, for the bike in the new house. Temporary because, firstly, I can't offer a bedroom to a bicycle and, secondly, because I planned to use it on all the following days for short or long rides. Cycling is one of my favourite things to do.
That's what I did as a kid, shy and with few friends, while my sister spent whole days with hers and came home as blown away as happy, incredulous that I didn't want to join them.
Riding a bicycle was also what I did, not as often as I would have liked, in the last few years, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied, but always with the amazement of those who know that what they are going to do, will do them good. And, despite this, the bicycle has been, for five months now, in exactly the same place I put it when I moved it from its shelter: leaning against a wall, with its tyres down, tired of waiting to get to know the new neighbourhood, the people, the new paths. What I've gotten out of it is pretty debatable: body aches and frustration that our relationship boils down to squinting - pretend I don't even see you! - and a plethora of excuses not to pick her up and let us both walk out the door.
What does this matter at the turn of autumn? It matters the same as at any other time of the year. And this is also saying that it may not matter at all. Only that it depends, metaphorically speaking of course, on how far we want to know ourselves. Even if doing nothing and leaving it there meant not thinking about it... #soquenao. Every day I go there, look at her, one day I fill my tyres again and end up leaving her in the same place because "now it's no good for me to go out with you". Like every day I look at the mess that 2021 is, and I challenge myself: although it is time to change? Although to do as St. Anthony Abbot said "Each morning I tell my heart: today I begin."
After all, what happens if I don't pick up the bike again? Well, nothing tragic, and it won't be a drama either. But let's say it depends on the perspective. Let's consider that our life is built with certain characteristics, ways of being and being, habits and routines, beliefs and rules that form a certain, let's call it, system. A change, however small, creates entropy in the system and the need for it to reorganise itself. And, quite often, we ask ourselves why the hell we cannot continue to live the same way, perhaps "pretending", even if unconsciously, that nothing has happened. Our brain gets used (too much and too quickly) to what it already knows. So any necessary change may, at certain times, seem impossible to make, a Herculean effort, like Sisyphus' myth. What is certain is that, although it may not seem so, stubbornly insisting that the system should remain functional under these conditions means frustration and a waste of energy infinitely greater than if we look "with eyes to see" and listen to what is (happening) to us, asking ourselves what we need and what we lack in order to live in harmony again, with ourselves and with our surroundings.
If we always do everything the same, what does that say about us, where are we, where are we going? Because continuing to walk along the paths that we think we already know is not only misleading (if we look hard enough, we know that the paths will no longer be exactly the same), but we risk not discovering anything new, constantly finding arguments and obstacles that keep us away from the novelty that also has the "tormenting" form of the unknown, but which will allow us to bend but not to break, and if we do break, at least not to die. After all, "what has not yet arrived is infinite".
Change, at first sight, may seem like no fun at all. Worse, it may bring us more to the forefront the feeling that we are not ready: not now, tomorrow. Now, full of grace is the opportunity to make ourselves present, to remember who we want to be, what we need and what we don't need or want to be or have around.
Many years ago, a very small child said to me more or less like this "Oh Jane, I always want my life to be made up of different days". I think a few days ago she said it to me again, though using other words: "tomorrow, when you wake up, before getting out of bed, be present and put down the foot that you don't usually put down every day when you get up". To tell you the truth, Zé, I forgot. Throughout that day I thought several times that I would do it the next day. Only now it came back to me. I promise that tomorrow my left foot will be the first to go down.
