De volta para o FUTURO - oh yeah!

Every now and then we come across something that takes us back to our past. I'm not talking about a Deja-Vu kinda thing. This is more real and a very flexible phenomenon, one could say, as your "past" can be defined as anything that happened a second ago to the moment you were born. But the thing is that...as we get older these "going back to my past" experiences tend to happen more frequently.

Yesterday it was about noon and I was driving downtown, making my way back home. As I tried to figure in my brain what be a fast and at the same time a different way to drive back, I decided to go past this church I attented as a kid. It was almost noon so I figured the service should be almost over and everyone would be out on the sidewalk, chatting. Who knows, maybe I would run into some old friend. So I did it.

I drove past Rua 70, very slowly, as if I was searching for something. As the car slowly moved in my mind there was like a movie. In a fraction of seconds I was able to replay scattered moments I had lived right there, on that sidewalk. Feelings were also present. I remembered when the church looked different, before its first renovations in 93. The front looks completely distinct now. And smaller, I thought. As I gazed at the people standing there, searching for familiar faces, I remembered what it felt like to be part of that community.

The obvious question after that episode which must have lasted for about 1 or 2 minutes is: do you miss it? are you better off now?
No, I don't miss it, and I honestly believe I am better off right now, where I am. Rather than having followed the teachings and preachings taught there, I went my separate way about 5 years ago. And even though that may not seem like such a long time, it is enough to make the whole thing feel incredibly distant in the past, almost like a novel. Hard to believe that for a long time so many aspects of my life were tied up to those people and to that philosophy.

I guess it was Solomon who wrote on Ecclesiates that "no man in the right mind would say the old days were better than the actual ones". The irony to that is that my grandpa was the one who first told me about this particular passage. It's ironic because the older we get the more we tend to look back and now ahead, for the obvious reason that we just don't have as much time to plan and dream about the future as before. Well, whatever it is, I still don't think the past should be overlooked. But... it shouldn't be overrated either. Yes, history teaches us lessons and it may even shed some light on the future, but it could never predict it. Nor could anyone. At the same time....the so called "future" will never be a reality. So we're presented with the problem of walking that fine line between seizing the present and thinking ahead.

In the end we're left with a bunch of good advices and no tangible action plan of WHAT-TO-DO, meaning that we can just sit and whine about it....or take the opportunity to actually DO WHAT WE WANT!....right?

Ok, enough of this bullshit!