Translated by: Ana C. Geldres C. (Professional Translator & Interpreter English-French-Spanish) - ana.geldres[at]gmail.com
This is a voluntary-based translation. Proposals, proofreading and comments about the understandability of the contents highly appreciated here
© Pablo Castiñeiras
<<The 20th century has transformed the entire planet from a finite world of certainties to an infinite world of questioning and doubt. So, if ever there was a need to stimulate creative imagination and initiative on the part of individuals, communities and whole societies, that time is now. The notion of creativity can no longer be restricted to the arts; it must be applied across the full spectrum of human problem-solving.>>
“Our Creative Diversity”, 1997, UNESCO
- Pal, nobody said the path was easy.
- Not even flying above the clouds?
- Not even then, as in the sea of your childhood, there are waves and tides within the sea of clouds as well.
…
- Over there, where the horizon ends, is there a world of virtue and security?
- No. Over there will rest your friendship for life, which, just as friendship among human beings, is not based on loving virtues but on accepting their defects.
*
Some gurus, experts in robotics and artificial intelligence were asked (long before the appearance of films where intelligent machines heartlessly take control of our weak management of the world, as if they were people instead of machines) and declared that they saw future as a paradise. There, robots and computers would take all necessary decisions so that human beings would live in the best conditions and in the best artificial environments, just as we act with animals that we keep captive in the zoos.
This need to change freedom for virtual security is still in force, except that today no person in particular would personify that childlike father to whom we could give in the decision-making. It is the carpe diem and each one’s tyranny, believing oneself better than the others and an unknown leader, which is being imposed.
You do not choose (at least according to occidental beliefs) where to be born and who will accompany you during your first and key moments of your existence. Family are those individuals who, forced by blood relationship, genetics or the decision to support, accompany, educate and protect, decide to accept those vital commitments regarding other equal or more helpless ones.
We are all born within a family and look for creating our own; not determined so much by the chance of birth neither by genealogical circumstances but by vital choices. We try to stop being alone, before the horror of the infinite and dark Universe and the existence full of non-answered basic questions. We are born and we die, sometimes with some help, but fundamentally alone.
Family love is not inherited; love in general is not generated by kinship. It is just an act of generosity: you love me; I love you. That is it.
What each one shows as love is something very different. The famous phrase “there are loves that kill” becomes true when, as the consequence of a bad education, love is considered as selfish fullfillment of personal needs in a conscious or unconscious way.
Just as true knowledge does not hide in dusty corners of distinguished universities, but in nooks and small dirty places of life, the second family is not the one you received at birth but the one that you search and mutually choose. In it, members respect each other for what they are and that makes them special. That doesn’t last forever but is present in those moments when you were looking for a common place and experience, and you find someone who seems to have the same needs you do, looking for fun and life in company. It sometimes happens until death does you apart although more often when habit and distance cause it. In any case, the relationship is still there in the memories and small corners of the heart.
*
During my Hungarian summer and autumn, the EVS house at that time was in Kerepes, dorm city 20 minutes far from Budapest. It became a dear ritual to take the suburban railway to that place, many Friday nights, from the last stop of the capital city`s metro line 2, I took every time I got out the Southern train station in the capital of the Danube.
I remember gloomily those trips in the suburban, with its characteristic rhythm every time a stop was announced. The clatter, between slow and weak, snuggling us up all the way home; going across the myriad of other houses within the natural vegetation on the hillsides of the great city. Green and electric wagons uniting and crossing the small dorm populations of the route.
*
In an old cottage four volunteers lived together, each one had a big room connected to a lengthy living room to which one could enter through an entrance that was common to a big kitchen-dining room and a cupboard. The house had a long plot filled with grass and weed, where they used to make barbecues because of birthdays or farewell parties for some EVS volunteers in the country. Nearby, one could find the original building of the house, a series of rooms and farm stays almost in the open air, which were the home of the earlier inhabitants of that plot, which give the house a halo of mystery…
In one of the rooms where slept a Portuguese volunteer, there was an old portrait of whom we supposed to be the earlier inhabitants of the original house. One day we were making jokes about the old houses and the spirits that used to live there; this girl proved to be very apprehensive about the topic, although she was supposed to have a scientific mentality because of her studies of Biological Sciences. She got upset when I joked, supporting her fears on the event that the said portrait, which so far had been hanging on the wall, had mysteriously appeared on the wardrobe. I tried to calm her saying that spirits had no material body so they might move something but not so much to take it from the wall and leave it somewhere else… and that she should not worry because I already had some experience with ghosts. It was curious and surprising to see her so worried. Finally, the mystery with the photo resulted, as was to be expected, a mere coincidence: the owner of the house had visited it that morning and, not having found anyone inside, took the photo down for some reason.
Anecdotes apart, every time I went to that house, I felt a special energy (not paranormal as the one we joked about) that made me feel at ease. They lived at a mere half an hour of the big city, which gave all opportunities of fun and leisure. For instance, they could go to those fantastic and typical open-air pubs within the patio ruins of some Budapest buildings so difficult for tourists to find. Some of them worked with children and others in environmental projects. They lived in the middle of nature in small populations with all facilities, and surrounded by abundant nature. I was very envious for not having been so lucky to live with such luxuries, in comparison to how I lived in my hosting city. I was especially jealous, for not being surrounded by those volunteers that were for me like a family.
Seen from outside, like anything seen from outside, they seemed to have an idyllic and even romantic life together. The reality was, as today young but post-modern adventurers, that although respect prevailed, there were usual problems and tension of living together: understandings, alliances, disagreements and loves at first sight.
Montse, my dear and responsible Catalonian EVS was a bit like a mother to all of them. She used to comment how annoyed she was by those little things that turn living together among unknown people into the fun of TV reality shows taken to the limit. The eternal disagreements were about individual responsibilities, regarding cleaning or household chores, or cultural ones such as that French mania (which we Spaniards also have) of talking in our language when we are with fellow compatriots and forgetting those foreigners nearby us who cannot understand our conversation… The difference between TV reality shows and this house is that its inhabitants did not try to expel or repel one another at the first discussion, but they granted themselves some time, so that the resentment from familiar fights could fade.
*
I do not remember anymore how many times I have taken the suburban train to Budapest, or gone back to the house, lost in the loneliness of my thoughts and melancholies (I think I have become collaterally impregnated with the famous Hungarian melancholy while I have been living there). Neither do I remember how many times Montse or my other dear volunteers, which she lived with or visited them, went with me. Memories come back of the clatter of the first train in the morning that did not let us have our first snooze before going to sleep, after a long party night during the weekend. Memories come back of faces and silence, or short conversations of schoolchildren and workers during the working mornings. Memories of curious looks and vital expectations shared in several languages and marked by the rhythm of the train stops in the way to the large cosmopolitan city...
Time is not relative when daily routine prevents you to be aware of how fast it reaches your retirement. It is so when the wall clock continues working while life‘s clock beats in a time and space with no existence where there’s no place to worries.
The day comes when the clock marks the time to go back home, to the imperative of time of the irremediable routine, unless you become an addict of tireless globetrotting. During those months that passed without noting the fall of calendar leaves, the complicated and weird past was not important, only the young, immortal and alive here and now existed. The carpe diem philosophy is the postmodern vital philosophy. Not knowing if we do the right thing following the more than sound “live the moment”, beyond the parenthesis of unconcerned times of discovering and adventure. I suppose it is the current times of change’s fault; the character and the possibilities of future that exist and then each one yearns for them, as all true love promises, within this general frame of uncertain future.
*
- Who said fear? I have beaten utopia, an adventure within the human jungle. I know I can cope with life just by myself. Have I not had to learn to buy food in supermarkets where I did not know what I was buying, as I did not understand what the labels contained? Have I not learned to cook my meals, to lick my wounds, to find myself alone sometimes and sometimes been understood by unknown people or new friends?
- Very well, in that case you will leave your parents´ home. Won´t you?
- Why do you remind me of that? It is not my fault having been born in a country where living in a flat and eating at the same time on one job’s salary, require you to be two or to have been born somewhere else.
- However, this is the case; doing whatever you want without having to give any explanations is over.
- Wet blanket! I am not very interested in going back home, do not make me act carelessly and finally stay to live here.
- It will not work out. As soon as your friends leave the country, what would there be for you?
- The locals and the city.
- You will not be anymore an exotic foreigner, crazy to learn to speak their language; just another worker, very crazy for wanting to change your sunny paradise with beaches and dark-haired women to the grey sky present here.
- That argument is more stupid than my last answer. Damned neurotransmitters give me a break, hell!
*
The melancholy returns, but it is one opposed to that you had half way of the adventure (when you were homesick for the known places and asked for a pause in the presence of so many novelties, by making a short trip in search of the warm of home). Directly, I will tell you straight out, you are depressed about the perspective of coming back.
I recommend having in this life a plan B and a project of future for any circumstance, especially for those moments of life with expiration date.
It is not bad to doubt. People disdain those who do so, maybe because they are not as sure of themselves as they want to believe. I do not understand people who consider nomads as immature, as if towns had not represented breeding circumstances for inequalities, power and discrepancies.
I wish to bring forward a sentence that my mother likes to repeat a lot: <<The one, who does not walk when young, will run when old>>. The important thing is not to stand still before what is finishing.
*
Thanks to this foolishness, you not only discover things about yourself and your culture but also about those who will always be waiting for you back home: the true friends, the second family at home who do not forget and remember you and ask you, call you or visit you in your new destination. With them and with the more familiar people you will have more difficulties to comment on the results of this experience (and the motives too, regarding EVS an almost unknown European programme). An experience which, within a few months, has changed your life so much.
You have reached maturity and lived so many experiences for which you would have needed years in your routine life. Those you left in your place of origin have been immersed in that daily life that when you are back will seem you so gloomy, dull and weird. At every moment, you will be surprised by how little things have changed, light years from changes inside yourself; yearning to come back or looking forward another short trip to other exotic destinations.
All that is good in life has an end and though we think that we will not be able to stand getting older like our parents, reality slaps you without mercy. Resistance to deny the evidence will only increase your agony. The parenthesis of living day by day is over. Now, once you get peace with your past, when you are back there is no other remedy than thinking about future. It is necessary to take the helm with force.
*
Although I hate goodbyes because I prefer “see you later” parties, I had two farewell parties that destiny transformed into “see you next year” parties.
The first one was in my project where I would say goodbye to my co-workers, with whom I shared so much and who surprised me and taught me so much. Besides, I felt wrapped up many times. What a group we were so different one from the other!
The last party was in Budapest, where my dear second family in Hungary (the European volunteers I had the fortune to meet and appreciate) and I, went together to have dinner at a small restaurant in the city downtown boulevard. We finished the dinner, which they did not let me pay although I insisted. We ate the desserts together with a bottle of the fantastic Tokaji wine, which they, at least, let me to pay for this time. I ate a brownie that the Portuguese EVS girl recommended me. It was the first time I had tasted one (till the very last moment, “the club of the first things” was still alive).
We went partying together, for the last time in the pearl of the Danube, marvellously melancholic and gloomy. Night was finishing and I did not want to sleep. I wanted to say goodbye to the city that had so deeply won my heart. I had finished my experiences and learning of the last months living a different life in another country. I let my friends go back home while I ended the silent night in the last party and noisy places.
The dawning streets of the city made me take the first train back to the house of Kerepes. There I would pick up my bag, say goodbye to Montse (who had made me promise I would wake her up to do so) and start my way to the airport where I had started the adventure of living the EVS. I arrived happy at the airport, almost euphoric. I stopped worrying about going back home as is usual when you face an inevitable destiny: the sensation that a stage was well finished, that it would not give me much and I would not give it much either.
While I waited to board, I spent the few forints I still had in my mobile phone, to say goodbye to other friends still in the country I was leaving, who I had unfortunately not been with last night. When I finished, I concentrated on a curious conversation of those in a nearby table in the cafeteria of the small Ferihegy airport. A South American man talked in a very fluid Hungarian of recognizable accent with a local, about what he thought about his life in the Capital and some allusions to the never-ending topic of Hungarian women… Not leaving the silly happiness that filled me up (chemical paradox I attributed to the euphoria of the night before and maybe to the lack of sleep), I could not help having an ambiguous feeling about not being anymore that foreigner who lived and talked among Magyars.
I boarded with no delay. My last memory, before falling asleep exhausted and waking up when I arrived at Barajas airport, was the look through the airplane window. The “see you soon” from the heights, with a big smile on my cheeks.
- Szia Magyarország!
*
Almost a year after coming back to Spain, I had the opportunity to go back to Budapest. I had just said goodbye to a group of boys and girls coming back home from an international youth exchange with youngsters from different European countries, held in the summer of Lake Balaton, the yearned sea of Hungarians. I had organized and directed them to have the opportunity of living a unique experience like this, thanks to the fact that the exchange was a project of the office for young people where I had had my experience of life and volunteering last year.
I planned in my itinerary a short visit to the EVS house to remember last year and meet new volunteers, even the one I had met in Spain months ago and to whom I had told the secrets of living in Hungary. Those days were the celebration of one of the biggest open-air music festivals in Europe and the most important in the country, a good reference event for youngsters in general and Hungarians particularly. I was there last summer, this being my first visit to a music festival. This coincidence facilitated that during these dates, around half of the volunteers I had met and lived with so happily were there again.
Reencountering and being happy with this second family of the heart was all the same thing. I was not alone; a good friend of mine accompanied me so that he could witness the spontaneous and surprising joy appearing among those who have lived together experiences of that kind. I have already related having seen with surprise, in other people, that same happiness when they meet again old European study mates. They were happy to see me as much as I was and, specially, while I told them about my future projects, they congratulated me and were glad that I was optimistic, specially Katell, who, like Montse, had to tolerate the worst part of my pessimistic and doubtful Spaniard/Hungarian character towards the future. Now they, and even other volunteers with whom I had had less relationship, commented how glad they were to see me happy and renewed, like the Phoenix.
That visit was the confirmation and a short parenthesis that closed the cycle to open another one which started immediately after with a trip from Budapest to the Rumanian Transylvania, not very far from the border. It would announce the start of a dream that was taking me to travel around half Europe and face future with a steadier pace.
That is another story, started a few months before my return to Hungary, not necessarily to be narrated now; although it was crucial to write this book. To thank especially EVS life, the so–called non-formal education, and the utopic ideas, for having set the basis so that some dreams became an unexpected reality. Realities I did not stop talking about with my dear volunteers, glad to see me so thrilled about future.
<<The European civilisation doubts deeply about itself. Congratulations that it follows that path! I do not remember any civilisation dying from a doubt fit. I think I rather remember that civilisations were used to dying for a petrification of their traditional faith, for arteriosclerosis of their beliefs.>>
José Ortega y Gasset, “Meditación de Europa”, 1960, Revista de Occidente.
In Western cultures, it took us very long to become aware that we were not rational beings, dominated by our intellect and the divine inspiration, but that this is only something we would have wished. The neocortex where is located our rational brain is younger than other regions of the brain and, as the saying goes, “There’s no substitute for experience”. It was a trauma, which we still do not want to be aware of, to know that we were not aware of many of our actions, based on primitive reptilian needs. This should have been the origin of the study of human psychology and anthropology. Finally, both sciences developed not to know (us), to cope with the ignorance of ourselves but to submit among us, in coalition with colonialism and the imposition of labels with empirical pretensions.
Despite the origins of these sciences, hope exists in the utopic people who will always look for the other side of the coin. Rebels with a cause that will refuse to accept academic determinations beyond those that life imposes. Even these, as human beings who pretend to reach divinity, will try to transcend life obstacles but accepting the limitations of reality instead of ignoring them.
In the past, people acted and were recognized by their acts, even though individuals had the right to identify themselves as representatives of a particular form of being and meaning. In this upside down world where we live, people are no more recognized for what they do. They are just branded in a certain way, influenced by biology and culture. As an irremediable consequence of this, we are forced to behave in a certain way.
After centuries of trying to be, as Christians insists, people free to do and behave as their will, the century of the great Wars of “black or white” creates psychiatric and socio-biologies to excuse and justify our acts in the basis of our congenital nature as the last responsible. Abdication of individual responsibilities we already talked about when treating masses, their passion to leave their right to making inalienable decisions in the hands of visionary mediocre people inspired by fear and bitterness.
*
According to the philosopher Gianni Vattimo, the so-called “weak thought” which turns individuals from pawns of History into its irremediable pilots is that which
to face a strong and univocal logic, the need to freely use interpretation; to face monolithic and vertical politics, the need to support new social transversal movements; to face artistic avant-garde, a recovery of the popular and plural art is required; against an ethnocentric Europe, a world vision of cultures.
To see clearly your destiny in life is to determine yourself more than what life, circumstances and society require of you. Who does not worry about his future is as helpless as the one who cares only about it. What happens when the greatest of your certainties, on which you had founded all your beliefs about yourself and your reality, breaks down and you are left apart from your greatest assurance in life?
Among people who scorn the immaturity of those who look for themselves and sail with no direction, and those who create ivory towers (as an easy and sure solution before the uncertainty), I bring forward the option of experimenting a third way: to become a pilot. If you become a pilot, you are capable of flying to any direction or destination. While you drive, you know the steady course you are taking and how to arrive to the planned destination, that will not always be the same, but today it will be one and tomorrow maybe another.
We must fight against ideas that consider us determined. We, which will be capable, -if we truly pretend, to reach other stars and planets, to create new biological and synthetic life... We really are what we do in combination with what we wish to become. Will the handicapped renounce to try to defeat and eliminate his handicap, thanks to the tremendous curiosity and abilities of human being to overcome any challenge?
You have to reinvent yourself continuously and temporally, experience personally to give life to new social creativities, against the determination and the spontaneous and eternal creation of modern metaphysics. We have to become actors of the consolidation of new citizens and new people.
Plurality will be something evident, if we stop thinking of people and stereotypes as true unchanging ideas. If we start thinking of personalities as something dynamic, as languages are, and built by the interaction of individuals in societies who generate a living culture. We must spread what is inside of each participating personality, and we will recognize diversity existing in others just as we find it in ourselves. We will avoid useless confrontation between individuals who will never be more static but dynamic.
The moment we realise we are capable and enriched by choosing each one’s cultural profile, there will not be a reason for reductionism or fundamentalism of any kind. No philosopher, intellectual or scientific will dare to create curative systems to solve any problem.
We all, like good pilots, will know and learn to drive our new boats to take us through life to the adequate destination harbour.