A countercurrent

You don’t have to follow anyone’s suggestions. You are the final editor

Duke Ellington

I go to the appointment and do it in a state of total placidity. Not a tweet from Oscar Puente could spoil my mood (spoiler: he never does). These days in Madrid they have been a respite. The cold wind and the rain in the almost empty streets resurrect you. Restaurants, as before, without the need to deliver the soul in exchange for a reserve in the second turn. The people who have not fled, smiling. The Torrijas de la Maravilla, wonderful as always. The shows, with tickets. The books, to shelter you; Traffic, to redeem you.

They do not ask me to break such enchantment with news of the real or the unreal. Living in the countercurrent may seem like a challenge if it were not because it is the closest to the happiness that can be. Travel when nobody travels, stay when everyone flees. Respect those who worship the bulla of an early morning or a Mena and ask them to let you not get closer to a step. Go to Finland in summer and the desert and melancholic beaches of the Atlantic in winter. Enter when everyone leaves and leave when everyone enters.

Not doing alharacas or writing a line because a sentence collects reality, it was obvious that the truth would be imposed. Read your first Harry Potter at sixty and be able to enjoy it in the wonderful edition of Minalima. Be clear that what happens in networks is not real life. Obviously. Forget your mobile when leaving home and not pick it up again. Suffer from Pronoia more than from Paranoia. Knowing that one is or not regardless of what others say. The diamond will be diamond, no matter how much it stains the silt that Rubén Darío wrote and in reverse, no look is able to change the essence. Install in rational when the irrational triumphs or when interests want to pervert rationality. Take a nap with a quiet consciousness while others get into perfidy.

Do not count the books you read and if you do not tell. Leave the catalogs and reviews bought and not read or see what everyone talks about. Read what others would hide. Claim that what you would not read is written. Be aware that living your way should allow others to live in their own. Enjoy the difference and the different. Knowing what hating is not a crime but against your own inner peace. Recognize the moment in which you have to plant yourself although important things for you are in danger and know why you do it, say what they say and whatever happens. Do not despise the one who despises you but pity it. Do not normalize the abnormal as it becomes dominant.

Save the joy of living and spreading it. Watching power because it is always dangerous. Respect individual freedom without plunging it in the group. Help and inform but not impose. Analyze each fact with knowledge and experience, not buy lists or ideologies. Walk with an umbrella, or without it, in the rain. Not to be afraid if there is no need. Do not allow life damage to make you a victim. Conserve the ability to see the defects of those you love and your leaders; Avoid falling into the trap of blinding your virtues. Assume that humanity never solves a problem forever or obtains any success that is not in permanent danger. To conclude that secularism means neutrality not only in relation to religious dogmas but in relation to any dogma. Remember that the past is a foreign country in which things were done differently and not trying to amend them. Understanding that life is not a competition in which our well -being arises from the discomfort of another.

Hariza and that is nothing but another change. Change is assumed naturally since it is the essence of existence. There is probably only one theme: the fall of man and his works. We are all going to die and that is the axis on which life turns. Empires fall and others happen to them. Enjoy the selfless use of the words made by literature, because the author was not interested in the consequences they produce but in the mere fact of issuing them.

I am not trying to tell you what they should do but on the contrary. We have the responsibility of encouraging each other to be authentic again. If each one assumed the consequences of not getting carried away by the current, almost everything would be remedied. Respect tastes and colors. Listening to the other in case we can learn something or, for some strange design, it is right. Discover that in fiction is the truth. Do not exhibit our life but before our own heart. Keep the insults and rudeness even if you protect you a mask because before yourself the same degrades.

Eating ice cream utopia when they prohibit sugar.

Do not drink even if your friends flipe.

Ask for a cold beer at a meeting of abstemious athletes.

Book on an Argentine grill on Friday of Dolores.

Dine at the time of intermittent fasting.

If none of this convinces them, take me the opposite, but first of all do not follow the current.

#countercurrent