learning to love

"I'm really good at Ordinary Differential Equations, I just got straight As, but I hate it."

Said no human, EVER.

Upon discussing with other people things that they like - especially when it has something to do with studying - very seldom will people love doing something they are really terrible at, or hate something they are really (really) good at. Of course, you have your odd exceptions both ways, but most of the time someone passionate about mathematics will be good at mathematics, and a teacher who loves teaching will... well, be good at teaching. This rather plain thought made me overthink of the things we love.
For the purpose of this text, I will use my turbulent love/hate relationship with mathematics to explain my point. I used to enjoy math, and was actually good at it for a few years. When I started having trouble with it, I had some private classes and ended up learning, while in second grade, things that would only be given in fourth grade. Things moved along smoothly, sometimes I would get frustrated, but then I'd understand it and I'd relearn to like it.
However, as the subjects progressed - and I had no more private teacher to help me - my profound hatred that seemed to come from my very soul increased, and I found it heartbreaking how one could spend so much time trying to understand something, and still just get wrong answers. I felt it was a waste of time and found it to be very stupid that I have to learn something my brain just didn't seem built to do.
When I was near my final year, I had to get some help a few times to get myself ready for my exams to enter universities. The situation was critical. I got two people to teach me some topics that I was exceptionally bad at and finally learnt them, and remember to this day how my heart leaped in joy while sitting the exam to go into the best university in São Paulo and found one of the things I hated, but learnt and eventually learned to like, was in the exam. I had learnt to love it because I learnt to understand it.
That often happens with people.
Whenever we meet someone for the first time, the temptation in labelling this person in your mind until the end of time is very, very real. The irrational attribution of a title based on a single first impression, absent of thought, investigation, observation or actual interaction might come easily to mind, especially when there is something about the person that makes them different from you - negative labels fly to people you find it hard to relate to. They can be either too quiet or too loud, or too needy, or too isolated, too friendly, too rude, anything at all.
However, once you take the time to talk to the person - get to know about their story, where they come from, what's their favourite colour (ok, maybe not that, but you get the point), hear their ambitions in life, you start to understand them as more than a label: they become a human being. Just like you.
You start to understand not just what your impressions were, but things that might motivate or explain certain traits. Quirks you found were extremely annoying and inexplainable suddenly make sense. And suddenly, upon this recognition, upon rational enlightenment and comprehension, you have learnt to love the other; in the 2,000 year old words once said, you learnt to love your neighbour.
So when people say that they HATE someone, I can't help but think they aren't just saying they have cross feelings towards someone, but that they simply don't understand someone. Maybe because of a lack of opportunity or effort, that person is just a great big question mark - and, well, for curious human beings as we are, we don't like question marks without answers. Like with math, it's easier to just decide we don't like it because we're not good at understanding that.
Upon further ponderation on the matter, I painfully realised this was not an original idea at all. Poets, writers and preachers have come across this same concept.
It is mentioned by L.M. Montgomery in a quote I have failed to reencounter precisely, but it says something like:

"We only hate that which we do not understand" 

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Avonlea 

And going from the happy small universe in Avonlea to futuristic science fiction into Ender's Game, we have:

“In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves. And then, in that very moment when I love them.... I destroy them.”
- Orson Scott, Ender's game

Ok, so we don't need to think of enemies and destruction, but I think you get the point I'm trying to get across: understanding someone may be a key factor in learning to love them. 

While thinking of love and knowing, this brought me back to 1 John 4. 

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
- 1 John 4.8, NIV

I can already imagine: "Now, so you were saying we have to know other people to learn to love them, and now you're saying that to love someone we need to know God? What does one thing have to do with another?!" Here's the thing, if God is the creator of all things, he is also the creator of all people and, therefore, understands every inch and ounce of them - so, ultimately, he is the one able to love absolutely every person scattered throughout space and time. And... if we truly get to know him, spend time with him, we learn to understand him and therefore, love him. And it is when we understand him, that we are able to start to understand others under this new light: that every human being has a intrinsic value, a uniqueness, a lovely soul. And this enables us to love much more powerfully, because it allows us to know them even before a first word is exchanged. We learn to see this intrinsic value even before we know they exist: we learn everyone is a fully complex and eternal soul, and just because of that they already are worthy of being loved. Any other knowledge after that, just adds onto the love!

So, after my rather disorganised line of thought, ultimately, what I'm trying to say here is that while we do not understand man kind in its natural value, and while we are not open to try to understand one another, we will necessarily fail in any endeavour to love. While we try to fit people into our expectations, into our standards, we will be loving ourselves more than anything else. We do not need to necessarily agree with all of it anymore than I have to agree with maths that '+' be the symbol of summing, as long as I understand what maths means by '+' and respond accordingly to it. Maybe if we just give each other a chance, some time, some effort... maybe then this love can be made complete in us. And just how wonderful it is to learn to love because we have been loved first. 

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”
- Timothy Keller, The meaning of marriage

Call each thing by its rightful name

There is this word we have in portuguese that scholars claim cannot be translated into any other language, and peculiarly, it is being away from Brazil (and from portuguese) that I seem to be coming to understand it and all it's meaning - and learning the importance of rightful words altogether. As many words in portuguese, it is not a precise or practical concept, but subjective and emotional -  I think that says enough about the brazillian culture on it's own-, and we call it saudade.
We can use it in a number of constructions, we can say that we are feeling saudades, or we can say we are with saudades. Overall, it refers to the feeling of longing when apart from something or someone, the longing to be reunited. Personally, I love particularly when the construction used is "estou com saudades" (I am with saudades), simply because it makes it sound like Saudades is someone, and sometimes it does feel like that.  When you really, really miss someone or something, it's like you have this gloomy shadow hanging above you, weighing your heart down and darkening your thoughts to an extent you many times doubt is healthy. It is like someone that follows you around constantly reminding you that you are away from the one you have saudades of.
Many people claim that it is like saying you miss something/someone, but I don't think it's exactly the same, and I'll tell you why. Suppose you had a piece of furniture in your room all your life and someday, for whatever reason, had to get rid of it. There are a few ways you will feel about this, one of them is you miss it in the sense you have the feeling something is missing just because it used to be there every day, or you can have saudades and long to have that piece of furniture back. You see how it's different?
But there is one thing about brazillians, and that is that we tend to throw big words and big gestures around carelessly. For example, when you meet someone - even if for the first time - before you know it, they are hugging and kissing you, and with what we call 'silly hands' all over you like you have known each other for AGES. It's rather crazy, because kissing and hugging are a big deal to other cultures - and, well, to me too - and yet they are equally distributed to random strangers and to long missed friends with no distinction whatsoever. Though many people like this 'friendliness', to me it sounds as absurd as wearing a ball gown every single day: yes, ball gowns are nice, and they are meant to be enjoyed, but when you wear something every day it gets old, crumpled, stained, and you no longer have something as special as you would want when, say, going to a ball.
Sometimes people will even use saudades unrequitedly; many times they will say they feel saudades when, in fact, all they do feel is that they miss you, or feel the distance, or feel like it would be nice to just know where you are in life - though not with the rational decision that that might be a good idea ever DREAMING of reaching their subjective emotions.
However much I would love to be able to say that is restricted solely to one culture, it is with great unease I admit that though we, as brazillians, are very good at it, we are not alone in this painful incorrect use of language. Many words have become tattered, used and very much worthless along the years from far too much use.
The word once used to describe something awe-inspiring like God in the bible - Awesome - is currently used to describe a sandwich or a T-shirt. Love, so abundant in meaning, in fullness, in importance is ridiculously spat out to say that you love a pair of shoes or a new pop song (a tune that I will be very much impressed if it lasts on people's minds for more than 2 weeks).
We have become illiterate fools in our speech, for where once could describe with intensity and accuracy, we now fail to save words and guard them to only use them when it is requited and wise, for that matter. I am unsure if this occurs because we have incresed the value attributed to things like a sandwhich or a pair of shoes, or if we have brought down our feelings to the level of things and therefore brought down the weight of these words. Maybe we just forgot the definitions, or just have reduced our vocabulary. Whatever the reason is, it makes me think of how many misunderstandings in feeling and in communication occur from such careless errors.

River flows in you

"So. Water. We're made of water"

My friend said in a joking tone, trying to change the topic under discussion at the table since none of us knew much about law. Attaining to my usual and comfortable facts due to my tiredness to think, I just laughed and said "Well, technically about 70% of us is made of it anyway."
The thing is, at the time I didn't remember, but later, as I walked by the River Magical Mirrors Road, as I called it (since it sounds much better than just "Riverside path"), I struggled with a few thoughts and brought to mind a quote I read recently:

"If then you are wise, you will show yourself rather as a reservoir than a canal. For a canal spreads abroad water as it receives it, but a reservoir waits until it is filled before overflowing, and thus communicates, without loss to itself, its superabundant water. In the church today, we have many canals, few reservoirs."
- Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

Maybe we are made of water, not only our literal 70%, but also ourselves in an entire metaphorical way. I wondered: what am I? A reservoir? A canal? An ocean, endlessly indecisive about it's boundaries? Or a still glimmering lake, safe and predictable?
I pondered about the quote, and I may be a fool for doing so, but I disagreed with it - I do not believe we were intended to be a reservoir in the first place. From what I understand in the statement, we would have to be filled, complete, and wise before doing anything, before overflowing, teaching and helping, and, honestly, I don't feel we can ever reach such a level. Therefore, we would be waiting on a day never to come to begin to overflow.
In a more practical sense, I think we are much more like rivers at present. At a given moment, a spring comes up in us, surfacing clean water that can sustain life, and begins to dig its way in through the dust and mud of a harsh world. We reflect to some extent the reality surrounding us, and may or may not reveal all of the depth - or lack thereof - that we have: we can be dull, dark, unrevealing and simply reflect thoughtlessly our surroundings, or we can purely be transparent, honest and let the light shine through us revealing quite obviously how deeply we go.
We make our way, guarded and guided by obstacles in our path and carve our markings into the world - collecting bits and pieces of where we pass, carrying that with us changing and being changed during the course of our flow, condemned to,  in order to make a difference and go somewhere, never be able to go back to being exactly the same as we once was. The specs of dust we collect here, will not be the same as the ones we collect there. In different parts of our flow we may have been purer, others polluted, but we still can be purified during our course (very mercifully for São Paulo's Rio Tietê). We may become drier at times, and flow timidly, but the little we have we share with the life we try to sustain. We may very well overflow - and sometimes may even cause a hazard because of it.
We carry on, and the people and events we pass by will change us forever, and they may accompany us for a bit - rivers may cross, rivers may fuse together, and rivers may even, even though meeting, never mix (as happens with the Amazonian Meetings of the water in the Rio Negro). Or these rivers may mix and become one, or may even separate after flowing together for a considerable time. No one can tell.
We flow and plunder on into oceans, oceans that never fill (Ec. 1.7) and oceans in which we can get lost. I like to think the ocean towards which I am flowing is the infinite ocean, an ocean of love and eternity, an ocean in which we find what we were searching for when plundering through the mud, an ocean that welcomes us and gives us meaning... An ocean in which we lose ourselves in order to be found. An ocean in which we resign our power of choice in our rout in order to be a part of something much, much bigger.

pluriverses

The streets were silent as I walked back home, and my footsteps echoed like a small frail heartbeat on the concrete. Due to not feeling perfectly well, greatly due to tiredness, I resorted to what I usually do on that occasion: putting one foot ahead of the next steadily and only cross streets when the light is green for me (something, I shamefully must admit, am accounted guilty for not doing so often).

However, my focus was robbed in a few moments and my eyes fled away from the course I had set briefly upon encountering from the corner of my eye a bright star that accompanied me to my left, but I just let it be, there in the sky. It was only upon the comfort of arriving to my street I granted my dizzy self the right to look up - after all, I was nearly home.

I looked up to find that there were several little bits and pieces of archaic light shining back at me, forgotten up in the sky. As I arrived in front of my flat, I forgot all about my concerns, about the numbing cold, about everything. I took my hat off - in a practical sense, it improved my view, but my more poetical self says it might have been in some sort of reverence to the largeness of the universe, to the ancient light shining testimony to our own little entropy coming down upon us from stars, reflected off of planets, travelling through the vastness of the cosmos, into earth’s atmosphere, through the lens of my glasses to hit my retina where my specialised neurones quickly collected this processing it abstractly through electrical impulses which traveled across my brain all the way to my occipital lobe, from where the information would be silently distributed to millions and millions of neurones in different regions causing me to consider and think of what I saw.

My mind went in a million directions, maybe as numerous as the stars itself.

I thought of it rationally, the rudimentary and self taught astronomy and astrophysics I have had access to in recent years. I thought of a metaphor I once came up with and thought was wonderfully creative - and maybe it was so for an 8 year old - that ‘friends are like stars, even if you could see them, they were always there’. I thought of how funny it is that we are stardust which can, ultimately, appreciate itself whenever appreciating the night sky. I thought of how maybe, just maybe if even for just a bit we all took a moment to reverently take our hats of, strip ourselves of little daily concerns that seem so extraordinarily troublesome, forget things that seem vastly important in our lives and just looked up to see how small we are - both before space and time - we would realise how very small both ourselves and our concerns are. But, at the same time, see that we are also gloriously significant: able to translate all these dots of light into metaphors, mathematical formulations, poems, songs, and beautiful words to one another.

Looking up reminded me of our paradox as humans: we are surprisingly intricate and complex - holding within us each a unique entire universe - and yet, we can also be extraordinarily futile and useless to the universe: if we cease to exist, it will carry on perfectly fine. We think we are part of the beauty, of the view - but we are just silent spectators in awe, given a chance to see beauty and love in a world we will never, ultimately, belong to. At the end of the day, in an equally glorious and fearsome way, we are everything, and we are nothing.



I heard some footsteps approaching, and suddenly became aware of the fact I had no idea how long I stood by the river looking up at the ancient skies: the world swallowed me up once again into it’s cares, but with a certain sense of wonder and of peace. Maybe the world, cosmos, beauty will carry on even in my absence - but none of that harsh reality can erase the wonder and exquisite honour we have in being a little piece assisting in the functioning in this vastly complex organic, ever changing machinery that is the universe. Due to this ultimate dynamic in it’s functioning, we are comforted knowing, that even if this machinery continues to work, we have a chance to allow it to never work in the exact same way - but it’s in our hands the choice as to the changes we leave, if we break other pieces, or if we help fix them.

Or, then again, I may just be spending FAR too much time with Anne of Green Gables.