44

Some days you find yourself turning the page. Life is full of days, and that should be enough. We only have a few and we don’t ever listen. Not even to ourselves. Life’s about to end. And still, life is just a walk outside your place, somewhere, where you’ll encounter… life. Other people’s life. Full of circumstances, vices and hopes. Life’s what comes out of todays journey. Wherever we go. However we choose to go about it. Life is beginning new projects, even when it seems out of the norm. Specially then. I never know if specially goes with a letter e at the beginning, or if that’s just me being latino all over again.

What am I supposed to do? Who am I supposed to be? Still no answer. Still wondering about something else rather than what I must. I do this unconciously, or maybe, purposedly. I don’t have an answer for that either. I am more of a question guy, I guess.

I have limited time. Sometimes you have to remind yourself. Sometimes you need to hammer the head that’s avoiding to pay attention to your inner «Pepito Grillo» to come to those senses intended to be your landing spot. Why should I go there? Why should there be a place in which by my own deliverance I shake up the world that surrounds what I am supposed to be at the moment? Why would anyone, including me, care?

I don’t… know. I do care. I think.

Life is but a game. This illusion has been there forever. I might be dying inside, as we all are, and there must be a way to accept to take part in this new thing comming up. Today. I turn the page again around the sun. I’ve turned 44 years old. It’s the 20th birthday I celebrate in Barcelona. This city has evolved into something else. The place is ready to give back 1992 and enter right into the 80’s back again. Bring back the wall as we need this new decade facing backwards inside the room. Who’s in the back of the class? Why are they there? What is it they want? That’s where innovation is taking place within the social disruption scene. And in the front rows might be the scientists. They want change to. They have skills, several degrees, a method and a topic they know all about. In the middle, people caught between the poles of the class. Or the classes going about their own path to fulfillment. They are all in the same room. As we are. We belong to the front of the class as much as to the back of it. Only, as Woody Allen played it early on, he only had a chance to go to the back of the class and choose from the options in that side of the board. Who’s making a living out of their own wit? Artists? People creating new narratives. People pushing the boundaries. The Charlie Chaplins. Cinema is entertaining and feeding people with stories that go out of bounce. The gameplay is being leveled by those outsiders. And we, in the middle, get to watch.

Scientists go about the way they got there: excellence. And studying. And observing. And asking the right questions. And making science. All the time. All the time. Until the impact factor hits the roof. Then they’ve made it. If not before, when they have already stablished a role within a lab. Making a difference from the lab bench. Finding new ways to push through the limits of their own view of the world, through the microcrospe. Through their practice.

We are called to make a stand to risk everything in order to be a part of a bigger process. This insurgency meets the needs of a society that is full of resentment towards the other, and where conspiracies are thrown at each other to debunk the fundamental issues that hold each others arguments. But it’s not like fight. It’s not war. We are taken to scenarios of violence because that’s been the case all over history. It’s the norm in our history, according to our storytellers. And we have found it normal. Customary. Was is just around the corner. Again.

New tensions in the middle east. The old commies vs uncle Sam. Nazis taking over. North Korea pushing the button. Trump playing war games. Drones flying to get you. A bullet your way. Paramilitares taking on environmental activists. Minning, the old fashion way. The land being taken from it’s local communities. Deforestation. Devastation. No jobs. No movement. No social non violent uprising. Who’s next? What’s next? Why now?

It seems like life is taking a spin. Pandemia has shown us a way of coping with our priorities. And somehow, we have all noticed how screwed we are/were. But it’s not on us. We avoid to fall into the place where society is being judged. We are coping with illnesses as we go about a dayly routine back to the old days. The new days have no shape yet. They are only real in our imagination. And sometimes, we forsee a bright and prosperous future. Some others, we are gloomed into despair by the blindness of our own.

How to change ? Why change? Why now? Against who? People are choosing to take sides. And two poles are always there colliding. No atraction/repulsion is taking more than two poles. Unless we create a new electromagnetic field. Complexity then play it’s own balancing game. Structural entrophy. Balance. Stability. Or ultimately, a bomb.

We’ve all taken a blow at the head. Sad news have come our ways as we have experience a new way to be caged. The caged bird still sung. And there, within that unfair imprisonment, freedom was casted with the spirit of heirs of dinosaurs. Not a small heritage on their tiny little shoulders. Sing bird. An eagle’s scream. A dove’s coo. I know why the caged bird sings. Freedom.

Are we there yet, mom?