
Last week I had the chance to visit Mexico City for the first time after the earthquake.
I was shocked. The area around my parents house looks like a war zone. In the principal avenue, that allows the access to the suburb where they live, in the length of a kilometer there are four or five closed segments because there are buildings that even standing are totally uninhabitable and represent risk of collapse.
A few blocks away is the area where the Enrique Rébsamen school fell down and the street has no access.
I went towards Coyoacán and there are complete areas of División del Norte that are blocked because of the same cause.
I drove through Calzada de Tlalpan and from Calzada del Hueso, until Taxqueña, there are lots of buildings in the same conditions; plus those buildings which collapsed during or after the earthquake.
I also saw people sleeping in camps placed next to those properties. Owners who prefer to live in the streets than searching for a new option to live.
I imagine how hard it is to let go what’s yours, of what has given you certainty, safety. It may feel like jumping into the void.
We clinch to the history because we feel safe there, for something really simple “we have survived” and the future looks uncertain.
How Can We Know If We’ll Survive?
The things we’ve been through are safe because we know them. The future is uncertain because we don’t know it. And even when we’ll probably use or resources from the past to face it, it won’t always work, then it has a latent risk factor, sometimes real; sometimes unfounded.
And then we think that “all the past time was better”, because we know it, because seeing it in retrospective it seems comfortable, safe and we feel enough.
It’s just that is a myth, a way of taking ourselves away the real opportunity to build what we want and staying in a place where we feel safe and in “known ground”.
I want to be really clear, because my view it’s not a comfort zone. Actually, I believe that zone doesn’t exist. It’s a safety zone. We, human beings, have a primary impulse to take care of our live and in places where we have survived; we believe that we have more chances to survive than in new spaces where we haven’t experience this yet.
The challenge? Stop looking backwards and start facing uncertainty. Overcoming the fear of not knowing what’s coming. allowing myself to dream with what I really want, without conditioning it to my previous experience of what I have and have not accomplished.
And here comes the step that can be lived in a painful, hard way, because we need lo let go the idea (the myth) that what we’ve had is better and realizing that it’s only been safe.
Michael Blumenstein used to say that sadness is the process through which we say goodbye to what’s meaningful for us and we open new possibilities for our future.
No Room for Sadness?
In this world that has reinforced and “selled” so much “happiness” as the only lifestyle, it seems to me that sometimes we think there’s no room for sadness and then, we don’t give ourselves the space to say goodbye and close cycles.
As long as we stay within our history, we’ll never be available for the future. And no past time is better simply because it can’t be changed.
It’s in the future, as uncertain as it may seem, the only space where we have the possibility to build, to plow the land and plant new plants, new trees, a new life; specially if the last one vanished in seconds after an earthquake, a loss, a collapse, or all together.
Where and How Can We Find the Strength to Look Forward?
In our enoughness. In our absolute certainty that while we’ve been alive we have and we are capable of living in life. And as along as we have life we can make it a good life.
Where is your heart? Are you still in the history? Do you miss what’s gone? Or are you in the goodbye process? In the closure process? Starting to look forward? Or looking to the one and only space for possibilities… what’s yet to come, where every future time can be better if you choose to live it like that.
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