Quando se vai a um show do Caetano e uns se decepcionam e os outros deliram... enquanto uns odeiem, outros amam o que é odiado... tudo o que se entende é que não existe consenso, não existe salvação como talvez diria o existencialista. Estamos mesmo a sós no nosso ponto de vista, ainda que numa mesma multidão. O que eu achei? Não te importa eu garanto, nem o próprio entenderia. Sejamos o que nos cabe ser e dancemos.

All we need is love?

Be shocked if you wish, but I must be sincere and confess something: I was never a big fan of The Beatles (if you are thinking about giving up the text now, acknowledge the fact that my courage to admit it, knowing the implications of such statement, is bold enough to deserve some respect. Would you keep reading?). The reason is that I had never met The Beatles. Of course I heard the songs, of course I knew the lyrics, and many details about the band... But there hasn’t been the moment where their music would express what my mouth couldn’t. It hadn’t really “spoke” to me yet. Maybe the social pressure for loving The Beatles had the opposite impact on me... the obligation to love already corrupted my understanding of what love is. To not love them was a necessary step to found myself in love with them. So, just aged 26 I finally met the Beatles. I must say I was quite curious to meet those four boys that so many people talked about. What would they have done that was so amazing? Everything, my friend told me. So there I was, very excited about watching the video clip as it were the first time, believe it or not.

 “All you need is love” plays the song, but actually I will dare to disagree. For me what is amazing about the Beatles is not that they stated how much love is important – deep down we all know that. What we don’t know is how to recognize love. And that was their difference. Everything could become music about love. To The Beatles love really was everywhere. And the ability to see that was their accomplishment… People love us everyday, through a sincere look, through a shy hug, through a trustful tear, and yet we miss it all the time. We miss the struggle of a people to succeed, the drama of a mum to educate and of a son to communicate. We do it because we are so busy trying to find our love that we miss their love, the only way that they know how to do it. By looking for love we miss love. By looking for something that we want we miss what we get and everyday we neglect love. What we all need is to see love… the stunning wisdom of recognizing it even when it comes in the most awkward forms, from the most unexpected people, in the most trivial situations. So what I wish for me and for you is to stop looking for it and “Let it be…” love.

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I have been quiet for a while. So I started to worry a little bit about disengaging with the blog. But as much as I worried and tried to write... sometimes words are just not enough. Sometimes words just do not translate feelings. And as this blog has a lot to do with how I am feeling, sometimes it will also be silent.

But silence not always means emptiness or gap. Sometimes what is going on inside is so loud that you need some silence outside to reach balance. Silence may also mean contemplation. Silence may mean genuine happiness. Or may relate to those moments that are so strong that they are not good or bad... they just are beyond descriptions. Those moments deserve some silence.

Sometimes it is important to do some silence in order to hear other people. Or further, silence is important to hear ourselves. Silence matters!

So, it is exactly because this blog is about words that it also is about silence

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Learning with kids

Yesterday I watched this really interesting lecture from the sociologist Sonia Livingstone. It was about an on going research with children of 9 years old. In collaboration with Julian Sefton-Green, for some months, Livingstone has been “following” a class of 28 students at school and at home. The idea is to understand the potentialities and problems that social media might generate to the kid's education. Some of the research questions are: How do young people use digital technologies within their daily activities and beyond the classroom, as part of their 'learning lives', and under what conditions is this constructive, enabling or impeding? How is youthful engagement with digital technologies shaped by the formal or informal practices, opportunities or risks, empowerment or constraints of the institutions and spaces in which learning occurs? 

For more information: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/media@lse/research/The%20Class.aspx

What was quite interesting was that one person from the audience said to interpret the discussion as the well-known fight between: on one side the media that “distracts” the students and on the other side the educational institution, trying to get them to concentrate on something that is important. And the questions that inevitably arise are: How disconnected from the others spheres of children’s life is the school’s content? How to build up a communication between those two worlds? And even further, does this institution no longer supply the kind of training that children deserve?

So, if the school insist in making children memorize stuff that has nothing to do (and maybe never will) with their routines, what the school should be teaching then? Or even better, how should be teaching? How may we transform an educational system that sometimes seems as an “industrial production” into something more personal and human?

Ted Robinson already proposed some interesting ideas at TED and the movie The Class, also brings some arguments for the discussion (both links below). I usually tend to completely agree with them, assume quite a radical point of view and understand that probably the desired education for children won’t come from the old system. But by the end of the lecture, Livingstone surprised me (and actually she was surprised herself). She told us how she asked the kids if they liked to be levelled by the school (kids are levelled between better and worst performance according to an ideal) and how they enjoyed the idea that now they could play football at school (an effort from school to offer other opportunities for education and creativity). The surprise was the answer that she got. They said that they didn’t want to play football at school and enjoyed being levelled: “at least we know what we are being levelled for”. To the kids, to know what was expected from them was a kind of security. And it’s funny, because when we think that we should stop levelling and start "gaming", they tell us that our job is to put them into levels and their jobs is to find their matches and games outside the school tradition. After all, independence and originality is a conquest or a given?

So… the winter has arrived

Today the thermometer pointed out 1^o Celsius outside. So, the winter has arrived. For many months I had wondered how it was going to be when this moment arrived: Will I be able to run in the park? Will I need to do what I hate and join the gym? Will I be forced to stop my routine of exercises that does me so good?

I stood looking through the window... the London grey sky finally showed up. No sun, nothing blue... just grey. No one at the street. Where is everybody? Just I planed to go out? I stood there for some minutes, gaining courage to go. I finally texted my boyfriend... I needed to share the angst. He told me not to go, after all, I was still recovering from a cold. But I needed to.

What I didn’t tell my boyfriend was that by doing so I was sending a message to my body: “it will be cold outside, might not be confortable, we might have to come back earlier, but we are still going... we won’t lock ourselves inside this apartment”. I wanted to tell my body that it has been suffering with this new weather, but it’s not alone. Mind and body are together in that… and when the body chickens out, the mind comes to encourage. It was something so small, but an attitude that meant so much.

Two layers of clothes, thermal top and pants, ear protector, gloves, iPod… and there I went. I warmed up inside my apartment and left home already running. For the first time I was one of those people that wait for the traffic light jumping at the same spot. I arrived at the park. There I was… facing it, feeling it. I could feel the cold passing through my gloves… but I could handle it. The wind challenged my jumper, but at least it was real. There was some cold smoke coming out of my mouth, I could finally see it. My feet were still warm, and I pushed the ground to go further. I was running… I was there… I was facing it… I could nearly touch my fear… and put it inside my pocket. And then my body told my mind: “We made it”.

Knitting

Back from my vacation, here I am…

Sometime ago I told you about how I was “talking to food” (please, read the post below before calling me crazy). Well now, inspired by my friend Luiza, I have engaged in something else. I started doing some knitting. Someone might think that this is the result of a huge amount of spare time. That’s not really the case. In my busy routine, I have been struggling to fit in some knitting time. The reason for that I have already mentioned... to make, instead of thinking, turns me into a better person. And I have learned some interesting things trough this new hobby.

I was always a really cautious person. As everyone else, I didn’t have everything under my control, but I enjoyed doing my best for it. Things could go wrong, but I was always sure to have done my best to get them right. So I planned, I reviewed, I worked, and reviewed (tiring, I know). And I would always imagine what could go wrong, so I could anticipate the solution in case that something did go wrong. Why to lose time with mistakes?

While knitting on the other day, I got one point wrong. And knitting has something that may be annoying: you just find out your mistakes once you have been insisting on them. So, as I was still not sure if the point was really wrong, I had to keep going, despite my dissatisfaction about insisting in a work that I wasn’t sure that was right. Well, it wasn’t “right”. I wasn’t what I had planned. Turned out that in the middle of my pattern, I created a new point and my knitting was becoming larger. What had the form of a perfect rectangle became closer to a triangle. But suddenly, trough this “mistake”, I could figure out how the knitting works... how we can enlarge or reduce the width of the fabric... suddenly I discovered a new path. Suddenly I realised how I could, for example, do a turtleneck.

It’s so obvious now... but how many times was I afraid to make mistakes in life.  I always thought that when people said they wanted to “learn with their mistakes” it meant that once they got it wrong, they would always know how to get it “right”. And this is nice, but if we can plan and avoid mistakes, why to lose time with them? But what I really got out of my knitting was that learning through my mistakes might not mean that from now on I will get it all right. Instead, from my mistakes I might get it different... I might see something better, worst, but new. Something not foreseen. Something unpredictable. Something surprising. Suddenly, to plan so much seems not just tiring but boring. I want to let life surprise myself…

Happy 2012.

my future scarf...

The Ides of March

Last weekend I went I to see the movie “The Ides of March” (trailer bellow). The movie is good; the story isn’t new, but still, worth repeating. Does the ends really justify the means? Machiavelli’s phrase is old, his words are still important. We tend to think that this question just relate to politics. But does it really?

I do have some maybe ingenuous thoughts that I could contribute to a better world. My ambitions provided me some challenging questions: What to do? How to get there? How to make a difference? etc. And I have worked pretty hard at the past years to answer those questions, to deal with those answers. And I cannot complain. I’ve worked with amazing people, at challenging projects and obtaining great results. Sometimes I even get the feeling that I might be really good in what I do and maybe make a difference. So, if I just work harder, if I just try harder, if I just think more, if I just give more... I might get there. But when I realise, by doing so, I find myself in this tornado of ideas and thoughts, crazy about getting something done, inspired by the possibility of success, obsessed about making a difference. Less hours of sleep, less time for healthy food, less laughs with my friends, less moments watching TV with my family... but of course it’s worth. After all, I am fighting for a change. Sometimes I even feel that I am actually in some kind of ring: my heart is beating fast, I am jumping in the same place, my eyes pop out in the expectation for the next move... and I may win. I may change something.

Is really that what I want for the world? The better world has racing hearts, nervous bodies and instable minds? How can I use the means that disagree with the kind of world that I want? And how I just don’t realise that by doing so I am not changing the world, but changing myself. Instead of being someone who could bring a change, I got changed.

This reminds me about one episode that I witnessed once. I was at a seminar and a friend of mine, who were still finishing her master degree, had been strongly criticised by a more senior lecturer about the paper that she had presented. Unluckily to the lecturer, my friend was supervised by the man who was the head of the seminar. So, when it came his time to speak, he strongly diminished the lecturer, he talked about how her posture wasn’t the proper one for a friendly seminar group. Strong recrimination and silence. Everyone thought that what he did was amazing. I thought that he had just done the same as the lecturer: to stop her violent attitude, he assumed a violent attitude himself. What difference did he really make?

So the question comes to: how to not lose track of who we are and what we want when facing the challenging events that life put in front of us? Maybe the big challenge is not to change the world, but to remain ourselves. No fights, no podium, no trophy, no big ending, no victory lap… but some integrity. Is this less adventurous?

ps: sorry for not writing last Tuesday, I wasn't feeling well ;)