Category: Blog

A phrase that stuck in my head today:don’t focus on how to do it, but for who, or with you, you will do it.

It’s easy to blame, to consider the obstacles, to talk about how hard life is.

It’s harder to live it, to change it, to work in spite of everything, to show up and have the courage to do your thing.

Each day, ignoring each wall, each problem, finding a workaround to all the madness, the fear, the will to be lazy.

There are things you can buy for cheap that are worth more and things that you buy for cheap that seems to be cheap, but they are in fact more expensive than others.

It’s hard to realize which one belongs to the right category, the only way is to test, even the common, even the simple, even the extreme.

Today me and my GF went to find a dear friend who also happens to be one of those people that always has a catchy phrase ready for you.

One of the oldest he gave us was “we’re made of the things we love”.

Today we went visiting him to talk about our wedding and he gave us another phrase which sounded like this

“In life you have 10 closed doors. The first 3 can be opened with 2 virtues”

The virtues are Humility and kindness. The trick is that in fact all the doors in the story can be opened with these 2 virtues.
Would the phrase be catchy if he told us 
“In life you have 10 closed doors, and you can open all of them with 2 virtues”.

Nope, the negative space in the story adds magic, and even though in the end this is a trick, it’s a great one.

Couple of days ago a friend and I were talking. He was quite stressed because of work and I joyfully asked him what was going on.
He said he started having some signs of excessive stress. Pain in some parts of the body that wasn’t going away.

He asked me the secret to be like me.
I think that what he meant was to be serene like me, because, honestly, I struggle with life much like anyone else. I get angry, I lose my way and make bad decisions.
What I think I also do is that I started accepting life, and what comes with life, in the way I get it. Without pretending that I should deserve more.

I don’t consider myself a better man than anyone else in the world, but thinking about his request there’s something that I realized, and it has to do with death.

Sadly, these days also marked the departure of a dear friend of mine. He died because of cancer, a cancer that couldn’t be cured.
He was a great man, a man that I admired.
In days like this there’s lot of crying (I did it too), but personally I also think about what is left for us to do. What should we do after his death.

Much like when my granpa died, I thought about what he left in the world, the good things and the bad things, and in both situations I came up to the same conclusion.
I want to continue their legacy. I want to leave the world in a better state.
Because I’m sure they would love this. They would love seeing the people trying their best to improve the world, to help the people around them, to spread love.

At first I couldn’t give a direct answer to my friend about my serenity in life and I still think that’s impossible to have a simple response to such complex quesiton.
For one, we seek too many shortucts, but we shouldn’t. 

We should enjoy the struggle because it’s part of life. While we love the struggle while working out at a gym, we don’t act the same outside that workout, but if you think about it it’s the exact situation. To improve there is a struggle. Struggling is part of the job, and shortcuts don’t exist.

And the other part of the recipe would be to accept life as what it is, people as who they are. Accepting the fact that the world is not revolving around us and there’s no conspiration against us.

Now that I write this I also realize one other thing: these words I write are the result of my struggle. If anyone had told me this before, I dunno if I had the maturity to learn from it. 
Maybe I would have nodded yes, but in the end, without the struggle, I would have forgot about it.

So yes, the final answer now would be: Enjoy the struggle.