dear son taue…
dear son peter…
I’ve just finished interchanging a couple of emails with an old friend of mine…
called… paranauinha…
I used to go out very often with paranauinha…
when I was… about… let’s say… from 21 to 23 years old…
in those days… he was a professional photographer…
we used to travel through the country-side of brasil…
and… he was always taking spectacular photos…
recently… I’ve just received a little note from him…
telling me that he’s just got a job in a TV-network…
... one of those TV’s which are like an internal network…
within a big corporation…
and… motivated by this new job…
he decided to do a “clean up” in his house…
where he had to organize… (or throw away)…
a bunch of things he had accumulated…
during all those thirty years he’s been working…
as a professional photographer…
I imagine… that a professional photographer…
has to be… necessarily… an organized guy…
otherwise…
how would he be able to retrieve a good picture…
taken some years ago…?
and… how about those others ones… that weren’t so good…?
he must be always… asking himself:…
“ should I throw this one away…? …or not…? ”
if he is a practical guy…
he would probably know already…
what really needs to be preserved… or not…
because he would have a certain sense of judgment…
in this case… it shouldn’t be so hard for him to judge…
a certain particular photo…
but… depending on the person…
this kind of judgment could be a little bit difficult…
such person could be of the type… excessively cautioned…
that is… he could be one of these persons who has… usually…
a certain difficulty in throwing things away…
since he would be thinking:…
“ well… I’m not sure if I should throw this thing away… or not…
I’m not sure… I’m in doubt…
just in case… I’m going to keep it…
who knows… someday I might need it…”
and… this kind of person… ends up… after a while…
keeping a lot of useless things…
on the other hand… there’s a kind of person… who is the opposite…
he doesn’t accumulate anything…
everything is thrown away…
the problem is that… acting like this…
the guy might end-up in trouble…
he might need a paper… a receipt…
or even a telephone number…
the name of the person who talked to him on a certain day “X”…
when he called to do a business-transaction “Y”…
the super-organized guy… has… in his (endless) archives…
taken note on a paper the name of the person “X”…
( an information which will… most likely… never be used…)
so… the conclusion that we are arriving at… is :
the ideal situation… would be…
to have the organization and care…
of the super-organized-guy…
but…
periodically… from time to time…
try to do a “clean-up” on the archives…
and select what is useful… from what is not…
--- --- ---
now…
we were talking about an archive of photos ( physical… concrete…)
but… we could also think on something even more interesting…
than a simple archive of photos…
we could think of a collection of photos…
a collection of images…
as being a collection of mental images…
which we have “accumulated” during our whole history of life…
just as the photographer needs… once in a while…
to do an “organizing” on his collection of photos… and…
separate was is useful from what is not…
likewise…
we… should also… once in a while…
do an “organizing” on our collection of mental-images…
… on our collection of memories…
accumulated during our lives…
separate what is useful from what is not…
… select certain facts of our lives…
and classify them as being special memories…
we could put them in a frame…
make a “poster” out of them…
and… hang them on our mental “wall”…
being able to select these mental “photos”…
means to be able to “travel” through the history of our lives…
to recognize the good moments…
to recognize the persons who made us feel all right…
it means also… to be able to recognize the bad moments…
and… the persons who didn’t do us too much good… either…
in this way… we would be doing our “clean-up”…
we would be organizing…
this huge archive of mental-images which all of us carry with us…
whatever is good…
we keep them with us…
whatever is bad…
we throw them away…
( or at least… we can keep them on a separate file…
in order to be an example of something…
which we don’t want for our lives…)
this mental “organizing”…
helps us to direct ourselves…
it helps us to know ourselves better…
it helps us to be aware of what we want…
and what we don’t want for our lives…
it gives us better conditions…
to be able to evaluate a person…
through the observation…
we have better conditions to judge…
if a particular aptitude of a certain person “X”…
has something to do with our philosophy-of-life… or not…
and… in case this person is too close to us…
like a wife… son… father… mother… brother… sister…
relative… close friend… etc… etc…
( or anybody… we’ve just met… a few days ago…)
in short… as we are conscious of what is good…
and what is not so much that good for us…
this gives us conditions to be able to… gently…
disagree with people.. who may present ideas…
which are not coincident with the ones we are having…
because… as… we gently disagree…
we would have arguments… to present…
( since… we already have the habit of… being… frequently…
thinking… analyzing… evaluating the “endless” “mental-photos”…
the “endless” memories of our lives…)
in other words…
we develop the ability of letting ourselves to agree…
or disagree…
because we have… internally… a referential of what is good…
and… of what it’s not…
for our lives…
and… once this capacity is developed…
it would be a lot more difficult…
to let ourselves to be convinced by a proposal of an idea…
which wouldn’t match with what we really want to ourselves…
and so… we would become less vulnerable to the external influences…
we would (figuratively) be holding the steering wheel of the boat…
we could drive the boat…
having the humbleness of asking for help…
to the persons who really could help us…
so that the boat could navigate safely…
but… in order to ask for help to trustable persons…
it is necessary to be attentive…
to observe…
to observe the people…
to see who is who…
observing what a person is saying…
it’s possible… very often… to see his soul…
to see his heart…
to feel if a person has good principles or not…
( most of the times… what happens… it’s a kind of mixture:
certain persons have… inside themselves…
a certain mixture of good and bad intentions…)
( but… very often… based on a certain set of criteria…
which we consider essential…
we can… sometimes… feel the person…
and we can “risk” a certain little categorization…
like for instance:
“person with good-manners”…
“person-with-not-so-good-manners-as-we-would-expect”…
“person with ethical and moral principles”…
“person (kind of) without-principles”… etc… etc…)
but… what I want to say… is…
although nobody is perfect…
it’s always good to be attentive…
it’s always good to be observing…
who is who…
and… to invest our friendship on those who deserve it…
… avoiding companions who are too “ruffian”…
… trying to develop friendships with whoever is good…
and… since nobody is perfect…
even with the persons considered “good”…
… try to see in them…
the points which are not coincident with your world-view…
and… gently…
try to demonstrate… through the speech…
( or any other type of communication )…
that your world-view differs a little-bit…
because of such and such reasons…
--- --- ---
what I’m going to do now…?
a clean-up on my archive of useless little-papers…
and this time…
it won’t be the virtual archive of images located in my memory…
but rather the real archive of the millions of little-papers…
which I’ve been accumulating…
( like the name of the person “X” who talked to me…
on day “Y” when I called to do a business-transaction “Z”…)
now… there’s a technical detail there…
if the little-paper is recent…
then I keep saving it for one more year…
but if it is a little-paper which really has nothing to do…
then… yes… I would throw it away with pleasure…
because this will organize my life…
it will make my life lighter…
but… (I’m aware I’m repeating myself)…
the true “archive”…
which must always be “organized”…
is our dear mental archive…
it is dealing with it… that we should be very kind…
a super-giant-hug to both of you…?
a super-giant-hug to both of you…
see you soon…
take a deep breath…
everything will be all right…
a very-big-hug…
your father…
…luis antonio…