What is there to know about ourselves?

I once heard an old saying that said “Our fathers are to us what our mothers tell us they are”. For some reason this never got out of my mind — something I’ll write down when I start my book about all the great quotes I’ve heard, read and invented.

While I distract myself with these amenities, there’s something knocking at the back of my head. It’s not a strong bang, or even a loud one. It’s just consistent, regular, like that chinese torture technique which consists in letting a water drop repeatedly over someone’s head. You find it silly at first, annoying after a few minutes, unbearable after some time, when your reality is then resumed to those drops in the head and nothing else really matters anymore: they can even stop the drops from falling, but you would still be counting them, feeling them. Once something reaches the depths of our minds, it marks it, it leaves a stain, shapes it to the point where it becomes the air we breathe, the colors we see, whatever we believe.

There was something knocking at the back of my head. It’s almost impossible to move ahead when standing up takes most of your efforts. I wonder how ancient people dealt with their doubts, their anxieties, their “existencial crisis”. I mean, faith has always been a powerful element of human endurance through the ages — we have a place in the universe, or a safe place in the heart of God, maybe a redemption at our own imagination -, but what if faith is not enough? Another saying that got stuck in me is one said by G. K. Chesterton: “once we stop believing in God, we start believing in whatever there is to believe”.

But what if we believe in nothing? What if all this endurance becomes actually just patience? A stare — not a glance, not a peek —, a firm, brave stare at the clock, counting time for the simple sake of counting time and waiting for it to pass, or to end… What if existence is actually a crawling through time?

Two things defines the human being (and this is a guess: who am I to actually preach something?): its resilience and its ability to imagine. You can sum it up in how many adjectives you find suitable. It’s its ability to minimally understand time — and its flow -, and its capacity to see, suit itself, adapt itself or even reshape the reality it is inserted in. Human beings greatest gift is its talent to mimic the gods.

Name resilience how you like: endurance, faith, patience, hope. Its effect is always the same, be it to withstand time, pain, discomfort, affliction and overcome it. That’s what human beings do: they overcome, as it’s overcome or die. Name imagination how you like: religion, art, beliefs, hallucinations. That’s how human beings survive: by seeing reality in a way it becomes bearable. The consciousness of the finitude leads to a series of obsessions that go from turning misery into beauty to cheating oneself little by little to the point where one accepts it as something different than it actually is. What is the true face of the world? Ask yourself this question. There are no right or wrong answers. Some find it depressing to see existence this way. I find it impressive and remarkable. Nothing is more human than the feeling of loneliness. Create a whole new world where one is not alone anymore is a work of the divine. Beauty doesn’t declines sadness in its halls. True beauty is a distorted mirror which depicts our own misery in a way we see and feel nothing but empathy for the other that is actually all of us.

For to see the devil within and embrace it is what being a saint is like. Give a man a blunt knife and the moment he realizes it is not sharped, he will slide his finger through the edge of the blade, smiling. To find God is to seek Him where He’s not at. Because he who’s not willing to deal with the imperfection will never be able to begin to seek perfection.

These two human qualities fight each other eternally. Our consciousness of time turns us inside out by trying to make most out of it, trying to leave a mark — a name, a oeuvre, a lesson — in the future. Our notion of loving and caring for each other makes us sick by letting the chance of eternity pass by through our regulated and accepted actions and values. Surviving through time — what is exactly like being God — is our greatest ambition, our godlike calling, our instinct. Our acquaintanceship is an agreement we bear (less and less everyday).

Every human is a potential god, creating and ending lives as the seconds passes. Every human is a potential anchor, a holdback to others. We are gods and we are, at the same thing, simple, vile creatures. Creation is never as clean as destruction.

If our natural instinct is violent, and coexistence is a sublimation of this violence, than nothing is more human and gracious than love. Love is the most valuable of human conceptions. Yet just a word and an idea, love is a common agreement of letting others overdue our most primal needs and desires. It is the ultimate redemption for all our faults.

All stories ever told are about love. In the end, there is always a fight between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death. Love may be, then, our answer to a true God’s abscence, a hero we created for the sake of our sanity. Love is our god. Love is our so called unselfish path to eternity. Love as a conscious choice is, therefore, a selfish ethic. A way we found to pass unnoticed through our mind’s watch. A character we fondly added to the plot of existence to make ourselves look good and deal with the fact that in the primordial fight, evil wins, since evil is the only thing in the stage. We love when we actually hate so we don’t let ourselves know that we actually hate our guts out. Love is a blunt knife and it is over the table, at our reach for us to slice whatever we want.

This is where this story starts.