Valentine's Day
(Or 'Lonely hearts' day as I read somewhere today...)

It used to bug me, this day. But not anymore.
Like many people I still think it's mainly a marketing thing and nothing more, but if people want to celebrate their love with gifts and dates on this specific day, well let them. There is nothing wrong with that.
I personally think we can celebrate love anytime we feel like it, and not just when the calendar says, but that's just me.
Anyway, sometime ago I used to feel upset by being single on this day... It was as if everybody was supposed to have a date on Valentine's Day and whoever didn't was somehow marked as a looser by the huge marketing machine. Silly me...

Luckily I grew up and realised that there are as many singles on this day as on any other, and there's nothing wrong with that.
It's how you feel about yourself (single or in a couple) that is important, not your status. And I feel fine!
So Happy Valentine's Day everyone! And Happy Every Day!

:D

Letter to a friend

Dear [ ],

Have you ever felt after meeting someone for a little while, that you would like to know more of that person? I’m sure you have. It is something that happens to all of us. Some people click instantly with us, even after just a short encounter, while others might remain total strangers, even after years of relationship.
We don’t really know each other, we only met a couple of times, but from what I know about you, you seem like one of those persons I would like to know more of.
I don’t know if you believe in something like the instinctive affinity between two people. I don’t know if I believe in that either, but I do believe that every one we meet has a purpose in our lives, and it is great when the impact they create is a positive one, and that is what I feel it could be like between us.
Maybe I’m being presumptuous, because like I said we really don’t know each other and I may have a complete misconception of the kind of person you really are, but wouldn’t it be nice to find that out for sure?
You are laughing and shaking you head now, perhaps. You think I’m naïve and a dreamer. Well, maybe I am, but dreaming is what makes us move forward and naiveté is not the equivalent of ignorance or of stupidity. On the contrary, it is the courage to believe the world can be a good place and that in everything we can find a good surprise.
You may think it’s silly that I’m saying all this to you in a letter, but I have my reasons for doing that. I could say it to you face to face but maybe you would feel I was being strange, if I did. And I probably wouldn’t be brave enough to say it just like this, I would more likely freeze, and end up saying too little or even nothing at all.
We are not accustomed to open our hearts so freely to people we’ve just met. We all walk around sheltered under the masks we use to protect ourselves; defence walls we built over the years, every time we were hurt or disappointed. If someone I hardly knew would come up to me and tell me the same things I’m telling you, I would probably withdrew at first and wouldn’t give that person the attention those feelings merited.
With a letter I can strip the mask and quietly let my thoughts and feelings flow to the paper. And you have the time, the space and the peace to read it, once, twice, as many times as you want, and give it some thought without feeling the pressure to give an immediate reply.
Think of this as if I’m knocking on your door and you can, freely, decide whether or not to welcome me in.
I hope you do decide to welcome me, because I think we could both have a great time in getting to know more of each other. I think we have much in common, but also much to learn and enjoy from one another.

Well, now that you know what I feel about you, maybe the next time we meet you might decide to take the risk of letting a stranger become familiar. I'm ready to take that chance, so let's just talk to each other, face to face, and maybe start something good.

Until then,
Take care

Love,

A bad relationship is better than none

I just heard this sentence from the mouth of a psychologist and it struck me, not only as not making much sense, but also as a bit sad.

I am currently single and I have been so for a while, but I don’t intend to be so all my life. Not because I’m afraid of being alone, but because I do feel that life tastes better when we are accompanied by someone we love and cherish. And this is exactly my point against the sentence above. Love, desire, respect, identification, sharing, trust, comfort and support; these are all the things that, to me, identify a good relationship and that is this kind I’m looking for. And that is why I am alone right now, because to find what I’m looking for I’m willing to let go by all the chances of relationships that don’t seem healthy to me.

I don’t mean that in a good relationship everything is rosy and there are no bumps in the road. Of course there are! Disagreements, fights, bad mood days, impatience, routine, having to make concessions, etc, all take their part in it. And a good relationship doesn’t even have to be for life, it can be only for a while, but while it lasts both people have to feel that they are better together than apart. Despite every difficulty, the two of them believe the other helps him/her to be a happier/better person on the whole.

If you stay with someone who makes you feel bad, or brings out the worst in you, how is that better than being alone? Unless you are terrified of being alone, unless you completely depend on that person for some reason, or unless you have some kind of traumatic problem, how is it better to stay where you or your partner are abused, disrespected, stepped on or completely ignored? Because that is what my definition of a “bad relationship” is.

Good and bad relationships can have different meanings for everyone, that’s true. Someone who only wants a comfortable home and someone to talk to might feel good in a relationship that’s more about friendship than passion. And, on the other side of the spectrum, someone who thrives on passion and excitement might feel better in a wild and consuming relationship than on a quieter one.

I don’t pretend to tell others how to live. I can only tell what works for me, and that is to find somebody that feels “right” in each moment, for as long as that moment lasts. Maybe I’m idealistic, but being with someone I don’t even like or respect, just because it might be better than being alone, would feel like some kind of emotional prostitution and I would be an hypocrite towards myself and towards that other person.

A.C., Lisbon, December the 23th, 2006.

Fear & Hope

I knew something was twisted today…
I could feel it.

After feeling so happy and pumped up yesterday, with everything running smoothly - job getting done, friends calling, every hope being fulfilled - today has hit me like a blast. Nothing has really changed that much… it were just a few bits and pieces that were out of the normal way. Grains of sand in the engine, you might call them. But they left me frozen, scared and out of balance.

The dream is still there, while there’s life there’s hope, but… I feel like I’ve stumbled over a rock on the way. I lost balance for a while and I now I’m scared I may fall. It’s silly, but there’s a crunching feeling inside my chest, a gush of panic that doesn’t allow me to breathe freely.

At these moments I’m so scared that I may be wasting my life following a wild goose chase… What if I can’t do it? What if it wasn’t meant to be? It’s terrifying because I look around, trying to find alternatives and I see none.

Maybe I’m megalomaniac, but I’ve always felt sort of displaced in the routine of everyday life around me. I can’t live on routine, I need to feel inspired to move forward and that is why I set goals and build up dreams, because they are the food my soul needs to stay alive.

But what if my goals and dreams are too high? What if all I’m doing is deluding myself? That is what I’m afraid of… that I might wake up one day and then it might be too late to start all over again on another path.

Then I look around and see others that have dreamed and have succeeded and that is why I can’t give up. Nobody ever said life was easy and those who give up for fear of not succeeding are the ones that fail for sure. Fear is not a good advisor.

I might reach my dream and I might not. There’s a 50/50 percent change, like in everything in life, and that is why I cannot just give up. If indeed I’m wrong in my choices, then I’ll deal with it as time comes, but for now I have to keep believing… keep hoping I’ve made the right choice, keep working to fulfil my dream and believe that something good might come out of it. My time will come!


A.C. September the 5th, 2006

Owning celebrities

Have you ever noticed how some people sometimes think about celebrities as if they own them? They make comments, accusations, and they judge their behaviour or the way they lead their lives as if they had the right to decide on what they do.

Sometimes people even make stupid or rude remarks at celebrities that they would probably never make face to face to a perfect stranger. We wouldn't ever say to a stranger on the street: “that shirt makes you look awful”, “cut your hair, you look stupid”, “that girlfriend/boyfriend doesn’t suit you, dump her/him!”, “you’re playing/acting like shit, get a grip on yourself!”. We would never say that in our normal daily life because that type of comment would be considered just plain crazy, or at the very least, ill mannered. But people sometimes do say stuff like that to their idols when they meet them by chance. And why do they do that?

I think to most of us celebrities are at the same time objects of worship and objects of envy. We think about them, we pay attention to what they do and some more passionate of more obsessed, follow their lives, inspect their actions, and even try to imitate them. So in the end we don’t see them like flesh and blood persons. They become in our eyes objects, demigods, or metaphors of the dream we would like to live, but not real people.

But the bottom line is that they are human beings. They are made of flesh and blood just like everybody else. And even if their daily life is very different from our own; even if they have more glamour, heaps of money, tons of fame and seem in our eyes the luckiest people alive, they are still people. They have doubts, they have dreams, they feel fear, they feel miserable, they feel happy, they laugh, and they are sometimes as confused and stressed out just like the rest of us. And no matter how frequently they get inside our houses through the TV screen, we don’t really know them. No matter how much knowledge or information you have about someone you cannot know who they are until you really talk to them and interact socially (in fact you may even spend years with someone and in the end find out you never knew that person for real! But this would be a whole new ball game to be dealt with in another page of thoughts!).

My point here is that we sometimes overreact about celebrities because we tend to get sucked in by our passion, and hence we delude ourselves into thinking we can ‘sort of' live their lives through them. But although it’s ok to admire someone and follow their career, we should never forget that the real stars in our lives are ourselves, and ours are the only lives we can change for the better if we really want to!

A.C., Lisbon, August the 27th, 2006

Internet friendship

My mother gets really confused every time I tell her something I heard from my sister in law when we talked online. To her, talking is face to face or by phone. Talking online confuses her. I suppose it’s a generational difference, because I grew up using computers so they are as normal a tool of communication as the telephone or letters, but there’s more than that. What really confuses my mother more is when I tell her about someone I’ve met online, in a chat room or in a forum.

Of course there is a difference between talking to someone you’ve never met, as opposed to talking to a friend you know from school or from work. To the first you can perhaps be more open about your beliefs, and ideas, or even dreams because, and since you will probably never meet, whatever judgement he/she may form about you has little impact on you life. So, in a way, you’re freer to be yourself. But on the other hand, traditional friends know you more fully because they know not only what you say, but also how you act and react to different events. But because these friends are closer and have the power to judge and influence you, we sometimes hide certain parts of ourselves for fear of not being accepted.

Shakespeare once said that “it is better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all”. By the same token I too believe that it is better to have different kinds of friends, than just the one type. Diversity allows us to get in touch with different perspectives of life and that is what makes us richer!

A.C., May, 2006

When can you tell whether a gut feeling is just wishful thinking or when it is a premonition?

A rational observer might say that events just happen off chance and that there are no coincidences. Just because one has a feeling about something doesn’t mean that person has premonitory talents. He may just be a good observer, someone with a good ability to read the feelings of others, or someone capable of discerning a sequence of events or situations around him and, therefore, is able to “predict” a fact or a reaction. That has nothing to do with ESP, but with a good emotional intelligence or with a high IQ.

On the other hand, there are people who have predicted or guessed things to which they had no previous knowledge of. I, myself, have already “dreamed” of places or situations that I had never seen before. At the time of the dream the place or the situation made no sense, but sometime afterwards I’ve found myself in the middle of the event I had previously dreamed about; there I was in a new job, chatting with my new colleagues, or on vacation in a foreign city with friends and suddenly I had a strong feeling of déjà vu, a feeling that I had already lived that moment before. And I had, in my dream.

Sometimes there are coincidences that seem to point that people are meant to be together or that certain situations make sense in a sequence of events. For example, my mother’s and my father’s birthdates are multiples of each other (her birth date is on the 11th of May – month nr. 5 – and his is on the 22nd of October – month nr. 10). That is just one example of a coincidence, that I have noticed more than once, and not only in my family. It can be just a silly thing, with no meaning whatsoever, but whenever I notice those kind of similarities I always wonder... There are more things under the sun that we know of.

Coincidences are also a source of hope because they make us dream. There is for exemple a certain sportsman that I'm a fan of. We live in different countries, and move in different circles, but by a struck of fate he and I happened to be in the same place at the same time. I was on holiday in another country, and he was there healing an injury. When I booked the flight he wasn’t even injured and when I found out that we would be in the same city, I didn’t make much of it because he was supposed to have been gone from there by the time I was scheduled to arrive. But then he stayed more days than planned, and when I arrived he was still there. Knowing that and knowing where he was attending treatment, I went there with the hope of seeing him, and maybe have the chance to ask for an autograph. I didn’t see him then, but, by a sheer struck of luck, I saw him a day later passing me by on the street. I was in the centre square of the city, after dinner, chatting with some friends and waiting for some others to arrive, so we could go to a bar, when I suddenly saw the guy walking by, no more than 5m away from me. I was dumbstruck and had no reaction. I didn’t even remember soon enough to go to him and wish him good recovery, or ask for a signature. But that didn’t matter, because the fact that I saw him in that manner, not when I looked for him but when I wasn't even thinking about it anymore, filled me up with the certainty that things really do happen for a reason and that what has to be will be!

Like I said before, those feelings of certainty we sometimes have maybe be just wishful thinking, but I don’t care because I now know that opportunities arise when we least expect them, and sometimes Lady Luck smiles down on us. We just have to be ready and keep believing that life is good and full of chances.

A.C., Lisbon, January 10th, 2006