In truth, each hour, each day, each year are vital phases of our existence, unique, which constitute a non-transferable place in a whole. Life is not a fragmentation of parts, but a whole that is present at every moment of its course.
The life we have lived in the year we are going to close is not only what we have done; It is what we have not done, but we have desired, tried to do and be. Life is not given to us ready-made.
In one of Jorge Manrique’s couplets when talking about this world as the path of life, the poet warns that:It is better to have good sense, / to walk this journey, / without error.
The difficulty of success lies in the fact that the series of acts that make up an existence is not capricious. Life involves effort, since it is an authentic task, always irreducible to what others do. Each one has to invent their own existence, in which invention consists of discovering what can make me the best possible version, a trajectory with a singular profile, marked by the hand of the realities that surround me, which are at the same time once unique and unavoidable. Hence Ortega y Gasset repeated: I am myself and my circumstance, and if I do not save her, I do not save myself.
The first lesson of life is that we have to live in a certain here and in a single now, which no one can replace. The second is that we do not live in the air, but rather we are made of the past, which we criticize or applaud because we carry it within us. It is on this past that we build our trajectory up to the present moment, from which we enter the future. By understanding our past, our present and future are illuminated.
When we look back on the time that has passed, we find life in the present, surrounded by people with whom we relate, because the life of men and women is to live together, which follows an always very unique plot, deployed by the unbought grace of the days of every day.
When you lose the fascination with living, you are trapped by monotony, which in its most acute versions can lead to despair. The reality that nothing past can be recovered, the need to face loss is consubstantial with existing, which is constantly “now.”
Life is accompanied in its course by illusions and disappointments, by achievements and frustrations, by loyalties and betrayals; behind the curtain of the vital scene one also comes to appreciate the evil, inseparable from suffering, in which lies a fatigue that, if not reacted with energy and decision, can lead to what the medievals called the tedium vitaeboredom with living, an apathy, which implies the death in life of the soul and the consequent physical ineffectiveness.
Living, whether one likes it or not, requires having some conviction about the world and oneself, which are common to people of our time. The reality that surrounds us imposes current ideas on us, we live in them and with them, in a similar way to how we live in the body that has fallen to our lot, they constitute the profile of the world, which influences how our life is structured, we supplies the argument of hours and days. We decide and act based on that profile.
The risk lies in confusing reality with our ideas, because we are too installed in their security, in a way that prevents us from thinking without prejudice, which is putting forward ideas without understanding them, for which they lack evidence and have plenty of arrogance on the part of the person who thinks them. The ideas with reactions to the problems we have; those without these are meaningless.
In truth, each hour, each day, each year are vital phases of our existence, unique, which constitute a non-transferable place in a whole. Life is not a fragmentation of parts, but rather a whole that – although it may sound paradoxical – is present at every moment of its course.
When the mature or old man turns to his past life and tries to tell it, it is inevitable that he does so from his current perspective; but this falsifies its reality. Memory is selective, it thrives on forgetting and imposes a certain configuration on memories. For now, you will tend to see life from its “result” – provisional, by the way, because the definitive one will only be achieved with death. Each moment or phase of life has significance and value in itself, with what it had in advance, but independently of what it has actually led to. The historical error due to a misconception of progress is that it sees each era as preparation for the next.
Life trajectories are plural. They belong to human life from the moment it begins to function as such: their extreme simplicity in childhood is due to the narrowness of the vital horizon; It could be said that in the first years there are several trajectories, but they are so close together that they seem to be confused. When they reach adolescence, they begin to become independent, on the one hand, and intertwine, on the other: they form intricate knots that increase the drama that always accompanies life, which is its substance. It is increasingly difficult to live it, facing all its simultaneous trajectories, and preserving the traces of those that have been left behind. From a certain age you can no longer live on fiction, you have to be in reality
Life crises lead us to not know what to expect, to decide and act accordingly. The child is no less a person than the adult, both are beings that live in different phases. Growing is a path, a path to be achieved. In which each phase has meaning in itself, and not as preparation for the next. Indeed, childhood remains an enduring element of a personal life. It can be said that living is being on that path, although not only to reach a goal, but also to find oneself going.
Since the most successful and happy life also contains pain and sadness, it is advisable to accumulate joy when possible, especially in childhood and youth.
For a child to see that their parents love each other is evidence that love exists: you have to imagine what it is like to find love from birth, Julián Marías reminds us in his Memoirs. It consists of the first stimulus for something as important as the education of feelings, since, ultimately, as Flaubert warned, all education is sentimental.
Crises appear between the different stages of life: between childhood and youth is puberty; between youth and coming of age the crisis of experience; From coming of age to maturity one goes through the experience of limits; between maturity and old age there is a distancing from day-to-day life; and between old age and senility, helplessness breaks out.
Jorge Manrique condenses it. We leave when we are born, / we walk while we live, / and we arrive / at the time we die.
Although aging is not just deterioration, it can also be the recapitulation of the years that have passed.
#passing #years
