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The beginnings
I’ve spent many years pondering the first sentence of this column. The beginning has changed as it has been influenced by moods and regrets which combined with age make this beginning a tree like mess. I have to let go to see what I mean. I have to find this mythological nopal against the light to draw the different figures that appear on its branches. I had to let go in order to understand and thus constantly create myself. I have to accept that there are many beginnings.
This mess will only make sense when the consequences of patience flow back to the land they came from. Randomly choose one of the beginnings: the birth of my first son Lázaro. Happiness arose in the form of light illuminating the course. I was willing to let the fears become the common fear that those of us who have children have. But I was also willing to become more idealistic and emulate the daring act of having children, being a partner, caring for and forming the most lovable and expansive team. Luckily – or maybe because I was ready for whatever fate throws at me – it gave me the idealistic side.
This attitude is not without fear at all. Idealism, just before his thirtieth birthday, appeared as an echo of how powerful youth is, and what’s even more powerful is knowing that some of your conclusions are wrong all your life. But that beginning, that commandment in word that makes us see the future as the only possible reality, invited me to continue asking the eternal question, framed and contextualized in the present: Will the earth be habitable for my son when is he tall?
And countless similar questions followed: How tragic is climate change?; What can I do individually and collectively to undo the damage we’ve done?; what and who are the most polluting?; Who experiences the same fear as me when I ask myself these questions? Is there someone who has the answer? And a very long questioning that involved hours of talking and thinking while my son slept in that very brief moment that babies sleep most of the day – except at night.
Little is known about the luxuries of real exhaustion and sleep deprivation until you are a parent. One is completely exhausted when one knows that this is the best insomnia possible. It’s also a fortune, a privilege, a way of sour communication with the cosmos one lives by. And on those walks, shopping for the excess milk because no one drinks cow’s milk in the house, memories came to me of the brave moments I’ve had in life.
“I haven’t had a Coca-Cola since I was fifteen,” I thought out loud as I looked at the drawing of the dairy cow on the tetrapak. I made the decision while visiting a town in the Huichol Mountains between Nayarit and Jalisco in Mexico where there was no drinking water but plenty of Coca-Cola bottles. It was a small act of rebellion, almost insignificant, but it required a great deal of discipline. I didn’t mention it to anyone in order not to have to explain the political argument and face a condescending response to the zero consequences of my personal boycott. Even then I noticed the thin smile that is drawn on the people for whom this fight has become a tired horse. Still, he read the business section of the papers to see if the soft drinks company’s stock had fallen — he saw any fall in stock prices with the same satisfaction one gets when one sees the hated team lose in a landslide . I thought all this and much more in front of the cow, which seemed to be laughing and following my gaze like the Mona Lisa.
I was tired and happy. All the songs and drawings had a new meaning. All questions flew away and accompanied me throughout the night like a tropical storm. Sometimes I managed to get up and write these concerns down to see if the next day’s calm could be accompanied by some clarity that would help me find an answer. But with every answer came ten more questions. If that was the nature of this argument, perhaps that’s why the term that began as “ecology” in the Western cultural hemisphere has now become “climate emergency.” Each question faces the great glass wall that Gunther Anders called the suprathreshold: in short, it is what is real but so big to understand that it sails above words like the atomic bomb or a big tsunami.
Given these dimensions, his concern grew with every step he took in understanding these questions, prompting many answers and more questions. It got to the point where I just wanted to hear one expert give an optimistic hint about the future. But that hint didn’t come, let alone from the pundits who already wore several duels by keeping an eye out for the coming tragic horizon.
And so the nights and days passed, which were already one and the same back then. Could it be that all paternities inherently provoke this questioning? Could it be that we are now not only concerned about the future of our children, but about the future of all of humanity? Will this be the first time in human history that these natural questions now encompass everything living and beyond? As often as I read essays about this and how a labyrinth can formally exist to chart its path, I have the feeling that today we are asking ourselves terrible questions to answer a call that connects us with the earth and with everything what we perceive connects. Please read this column at the end of 2014 by Eliane Brum. In it he gives a name to the modern anguish and fear that people feel – and which, I’m sure, all living beings too – are suffering at this moment and everywhere.
This “21st century disease” is the alarm that tells us to watch out for the destruction of everything that sustains us. It is an amorphous and very quiet scream that requires a great deal of artistry to be heard. You must see that golden thread pointing to the horizon and follow it until you discover that there is no greater joy and freedom than being on that path. And so, as in many other things, things will change.
Taking care of it and getting my body to understand the climate emergency has changed my life. It gave me orientation and combined with this beautiful and liberating feeling of being a father, where you finally notice! that there is someone more important than yourself. There are many ways to grow and make this happen. I don’t want it to be interpreted as saying that being a parent is the only way to achieve that leap of maturity. But that’s what happened to me. Or at least that was a trigger for these concerns, which I already had but never faced with a full head and a relaxed stomach.
I’m pausing to continue later, but I’ll end with this very powerful phrase, which Hungarian writer Sándor Márai makes common in The Last Encounter: “At the end, at the end of everything, you answer all the questions with the facts of your own life. : to the questions that the world kept asking him. The questions are: Who are you?; what did you really want?; what did you really know What were you faithful or unfaithful to?; With what and with whom have you shared with courage and cowardice? Those are the questions. You answer as you can, whether you tell the truth or lie: it doesn’t matter. What is certain is that in the end you answer with your whole life.”