Micro-pollinations

or the moment I began to understand the role of expectations, potentialities, and proaction / or how we are responsible for increasing the chances of making good happen

The scenario is the following: it is 2013 and I am an undergraduate student of design, working on my final project. Although I don’t stay long hours studying in the library, I do enjoy the environment; the feeling of being slightly overwhelmed by the huge amount of books, students and faculty; the grandiosity of the concrete building of my home university; and, finally, the smart invisible information system behind all that materiality. I borrow a book, and I become fascinated about it. Michel de Certeau’s theories of operations in space completely relate to my project, and I am always coming back to specific passages of his book. The standard timeframe of the library is not enough and I am not ready to return the piece, so I keep renewing it online. When I am about to renew it for what it feels like a tenth time, however, the system doesn’t let me, accusing a reservation that a student made. Before I sadly abandon my beloved book back to its original shelves, I remember one old habit I had when borrowing books from the library. Sometimes I would leave my business card or a brief note between the pages of a book and return it to its library system. Nothing (that I know) ever happen with those traces, and I never quite reflected about why I was producing them. Without any clear expectations, I write a note again — my last note so far –, this time explaining how inspiring and useful The Practice of Everyday Life is to my design project, especially the concepts of tactic, strategy and the ordinary man’s cartographies in space. And then I return it. Days pass, I get more and more involved in my project and other life events, until there is a new email, from an unknown and potentially spam-related email address, in my mailbox. The subject is Agradecimento (a nice word in Portuguese that refers to gratitude, or simply thank you), and the content leads me to an important insight. This student of French literature borrowed The Practice… to use as theoretical background for his analysis of Death with Interruptions, by José Saramago. He was struggling with his project, but found a kind note inside the book, reminding him of the quality of the material he has on his hands and changing completely the course of his day. He thanks the gesture, sends back wishes of courage and success, and communicates he is going to leave a note in the book as well, to propagate the nice feeling he had.

And that’s it. As it should be. No questions, no need for awkward personal encounters, no forced friendship.

I understand, in that precise moment, that my life is made of acts — sometimes micro-acts — that constantly project (and not determine, of course) potential situations. Life is both past, present and future, real and virtual, concrete and imaginary. Although I believe in coincidence, serendipity and chance, there is something important about acting in the realm of the potential, about acting without clear — or even barely existent — expectations. Being a proactive participant in the world, and pollinating mindful pieces of yourself in interstices of systems and circuits, open an infinite space of new possibilities and unexpectedness — reconfiguring what it means both to exist and coexist.