Not unique

   It’s amazing how sometimes you can torture yourself with so many stupid little things. I guess we want life to be so controlled, so perfect and calm that anything that poses a challenge or a sudden change makes us nervous. I personally don’t like people who say, “I like challenges” because no human with a proper brain would like to be proven wrong. What people that say that phrase mean is that they are not afraid of confronting themselves, but that doesn’t mean they are going to conquer their fears, it only mean they are going to face them. Fear is something very relative, almost having a world of its own. When you say you’re scared at night in a dark street, it is not the same fear that I experience when looking at a spider, even if it is on a TV screen.

 Anyway, we tend to make everything so big, so scary just to tell ourselves we can overcome it. Problems and dilemmas are now, at least in appearance, more stupid than ever before. I mean, people think it’s a problem to have fat on their bodies or to dress one way to a formal event and not the other way. These are dumb examples but they are the truth. People now have put their challenges at the same height of their apparent skills of when solving problems and facing life. They are so afraid of anything than even putting on a skirt or jeans is a life threatening decision. The idea behind this is that people face smaller problems, challenges, than they would usually do, avoiding the larger ones almost always. But when life comes and surprises them, they turn it into a drama only they can understand.

 Now that’s stupid. We are humans, a species that is quite abundant in the world, so thinking only one of us has experienced something that others haven’t, and it borders madness. We have a really big problem realizing that we are not unique; we are not as special as we have led ourselves to believe. The truth is, and always will be, that we are animals and, as such, our lives and pretty similar, no one really standing out. What makes humans stand out is the society and the rules we have built ourselves. It is not through nature that someone takes power over others or experiences a life of riches and others experience poverty. It is through the human condition, which can always change, at any time.

 Let’s say someone is born into a rich family. We would think that said person has been a very lucky one as money guarantees many things in life that, in any other way, you wouldn’t get. It wasn’t nature that gave that person’s parents’ money, it was the society they live in. And that same society can turn the tables on that family and make them poor, make them starve an d know what it is to have nothing on your stomach for four days in a row. It isn’t nature that took it all away from them, it was Man. In nature we are nothing too special but in society we can be the best or the worst, depending on how we play the game.

 Now, what does this have to do with those things that torture us everyday? Well, society made those too. They made us be aware of things we do not really need to be aware with. Like the economy, some other things are meaningless in a real way. We have created them as humans, and they can be easily replaced at any time. That’s what has happened with the technological revolution, where one device is replaced by the next with the simplest of decisions. And, by the way, those decisions are never taken by only one man or one woman. They are taken by a group, no matter the size, and that’s what changes things. That’s why there are no more beepers and only smartphones, that’s why we want to control every person’s move and thought these days.

 The things that torture us have often much to do with those things we still can control. It’s funny but even if we think we have no control over something, we always do if it has been created by mankind. We cannot cure cancer and we cannot make a storm at will but we can make human things go our way. How do you think some people rob banks or create them? It doesn’t matter which one is it because the trick is that we can do whatever we want with it only because it has been created by us. We can always change things that we have done; it is only what happens beyond humanity that simply cannot touch.

 That said, we have done many great things, we have advanced in our evolution and have even forced a bit forward. That’s the most significant relation on how we have affected nature but we still cannot control that evolution. If we could, we would already have people living in other planets and on the bottom of the ocean. But we haven’t because we are still severely limited by nothing other than ourselves. The only way we can achieve these things it’s by reorganizing the world we have and creating new technology based on us. Because that’s what we have been doing for some time and what we will keep doing for a long while. Of course, not all of us are going to participate because evolution doesn’t need all of us but it does need a group.

 The realization that we are left behind is a great worry among humanity. It is practically the same than knowing you are alone, although you’re not ever really alone. We just feel that way precisely because we have been led to believe we are special, when we are not. It is true that our intelligence and ability to solve problems is quite remarkable but it is quite impossible for it to be unique. If other intelligent life exists in our cosmos, we wouldn’t be special at all and we are not now because it isn’t something of a single specimen but of a whole species. The fact that we are so many, makes us less special.

 But our numbers make us prone to surviving, even if we don’t really have that in us. Because not many people have real survival skills but the fact that we are so many, like ants, makes us difficult to eradicate unless a proper way to destroy us was invented. And it has, by us. There are artificial diseases and weapons that could destroy every single human on the planet and it would only take a few seconds. It would only involve the decision of one person, not even a group, to do that. And the fact that humanity has given power to one above others is simply ridiculous. That proves that we are not as smart as we think we are because we have basically told some people they can annihilate us whenever they want, they have our permission.

 It’s all because we live in a world of fear. We are not really free or will ever be because we tie ourselves down with the same ropes that some groups give us. Self-confidence, fear, angst, sadness… So many more that we use against each other, only to makes us feel a little less us and a bit more unique. What do you think a person who kills her or himself in the gym is looking for? They are not there to improve their health, no matter what anyone says. They are trying to achieve a physical state where they can be above the rest, be a little less them and a little bit someone better. That’s what has made this “physical” revolution a success: we hate ourselves and the fact that we are so, for lack of a better word, normal.

 I’m not saying that people that go to the gym hate themselves but most actually do. And not only them but all of us but every single person that had forced change into their lives because they feel they will never stand out if they keep behaving like the simple and boring organisms that they are. We try so hard to make everyone feel so unique and special, that it is a great pain when we realize that no matter what we do, we will never be really unique. We can put everything on us, we can take things away, but we are always the same people, no matter how many costumes we put on. Our personality is different, from person to person, but it is not unique either, just particular.

 And that should be enough from us. Why singling us out to the world when we know we all have the capacity to do exactly the same things? We can all be singers and actors and engineers because we all have the capacity to be each one of those things and many more. What we decide in life, however, it is matter of the current conditions we live with and our personal convictions and tastes, that are also no special but at least they differ a bit from person to person because, as we all know, we are all made from the same stuff but we are not copies of one another. We are very similar and not identical and that should be enough for us to stop tormenting us by everything and start living for real.

You must...

   Kate had never worked in her life and it appeared as if she wasn’t going to work ever. She had graduated from college five years ago and she was still not able to find a proper job. She had sent her CV to every possible company that would be willing to hire someone with her profile but that was no good. She tried both with state-owned companies and with private ones. She talked to people she hadn’t talked in years and was even so desperate with it all that she had tried to be considered for posts in several fast food chains and retail stores. None of that had worked.

 She had literature and was only finding out now how difficult and competitive the world was. She never dreamt of someone hiring her just after finishing school but she had always thought people with a higher degree of education had a little more chance to be hired faster. That wasn’t her case at all. In those five years she had even decided to study a little more and left the country for a year in order to get her writing improved and to learn new things to make her skills much more interesting. But time passed and no one noticed.

 Stress was really winning for most of the time. On the social networks, Kate saw how many of her friends where even getting married and she hadn’t even earned her first paycheck. Some of them bragged about their complicated lives as doctors or architects or accountants. True, their life didn’t seem extremely interesting but at least they were doing what people were expected to do at that age. People were even expected to have children before thirty and Kate was rapidly nearing that number.

 Her older brother had already left home, living now with his eternal girlfriend, who would obviously turn into her wife in the years to come. He had chosen to be an engineer and was always working. He travelled a lot because of his work and seemed stressed sometimes but then he also hung out a lot with his friends and girlfriend so it all seemed ok. Besides he had his own place, or this be more exact, he paid the rent of his own place which gave him an incredible level of independence and Kate envied that.

 During the last year, she had begun writing several types of pieces, but did so in her own space. She had tried selling some of the articles to magazines but apparently they were more comfortable with people they already knew. So she did all by herself and was thrilled to see that a few people, not that many but still, had begun reading her. There were not many comments, but the few that she received were good. People that read was she had to say specially liked the short stories although some others, mainly women, were very interested on her articles about beauty and related subjects. She was proud of that, as she had never thought people would read her but still no one was paying her for it.

 The thing was, and most people out of college would agree, there is an urgency to do a certain amounts of things as you turn into “an adult”. First of all, just like the song says, it’s all about the money. There’s a feeling of failure when you haven’t transformed any talent that you have in physical prize for it. And, let’s face it; money is the oil of the engine that is the world. Without money there is not much that you can do in life, unless your goal is to be hippie. And people look at you weird when you are a certain age and you haven’t achieved that part of the goal, even more when people in the family have been working since they were teenagers.

 And then there’s the feeling of achievement, of having gotten somewhere with what supposedly made you special. Kate had always felt, for one that she was very skilled at telling the best fantastical stories ever. One thing that she loved was visiting one of her cousins and just make stories for her right on the spot. Kate didn’t tell her about princesses or things like that but about space battles and fantastical creatures and more realistic worlds but settled in the weirdest environments. It was fun for her and her cousin loved the stories, always asking her for others or for the “sequels” of some of the ones she had told her before.

 One day, Kate decided staying home was the worst she can do. She had decided to stop sending her CV everywhere and just think everything through. She felt she was aiming her bullets all over the place, without ever hitting anything or not even knowing what she was aiming for. That had to be changed urgently because she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and she didn’t want to add a clinical state to her slate of mental issued. It would be too much for her.

 So Kate took a walk. She decided to go to one of those neighborhoods filled only with houses and where people rarely walk around or anything. It was located on a hill, not that far from her home, so the walk was really difficult at times but the beautiful old houses that had stood there for many decades compensated it. She saw some of them hosting cafés, some others were small libraries and some more were dancing academies or were simply abandoned. She imagined various stories for the people she saw through the windows, the signs and the names.

 She finally arrived to a small park, located on the edge of a cliff overlooking the city. She had no idea that park was there and it was beautiful. The day was bright and almost cloudless so the city could be seen for kilometers in various directions. No people or cars could be seen though, only the trees, the buildings and, farther, the airport. She sat down on one of the benches and imagined so many stories she regretted not having a notepad or something to write on. She then remembered phones were more advanced now so she took it out and made small audio fragments, each one with a different idea. It was weird talking alone to a phone without anyone hearing it but she was glad the ideas wouldn’t be forever lost.

 Suddenly she felt someone close and turned around in middle sentence as she saw a guy about her age feeding the pigeons. He had thrown some breadcrumbs on the small patch of grass of the park but also kept some in his hands, where the pigeons would come to feed themselves. Kate looked closely at the guy and realized he was wearing an overall. Maybe he was in construction or something related. But he didn’t have plaster or white paint stains. He rather had small stains of several colors and she even noticed he had some on his neck.

 He then noticed her and smiled. Kate turned red fast and tried to turn around but the guy talked to her. She asked her that he had always loved the view from there, since he was a kid. She then asked him if he lived there and he answered that he had lived there since birth. He still lived in his parent’s home, not very far from there. He got closer and sat down next to Kate, followed by some pigeons that thought he had more breadcrumbs but soon became disappointed.

 They then had a very nice chat about the view, about what each of them did and what they liked. The boy’s name happened to be Julian and he was an artist, or so he said at least. She told her he had gone to France to study but he had left the career before finishing it. He had decided that painting was not something that needed a degree and he also realized he hadn’t had any money to go on living as if his parents were not struggling to get him through college. So he came back and was very happy with his decision.

 He invited Kate to his studio, to see his paintings, as she was openly skeptical that he was an actual artist. Realizing she should be a little more adventurous, she accepted the invitation. They had only walked a couple of blocks when he opened the gate of one of those old houses and let her in. They entered the house and then went down to what would be the parking area but there was no car. He turned on the lights and, effectively, there was a studio right there. Most canvases were in the ground against the walls but a couple of them were on easels and she thought they were great.

 One of the paintings was a scenery, possibly the city from the hill, and the other one seemed to be a human face but it was difficult to see what kind of person that was. Anyway, she liked the drawings and asked her if she sold them. He told her that he had just sold his first in a flea market, just because he had dare to go to one and just pay for one of the spaces for a day. It was all the money he had but he recuperated it with the selling of the painting, which was a nude male.

 Then, Kate’s phone began to ring. It was her mom asking her where she was, as she had promised to join her to go to the supermarket. She told her she would be there in half an hour and hung up before her mother could say anything.

 Julian joined her to the gate and told her to come any time she wanted. He realized she was just as free as him and that she appreciated things like his paintings. Besides, he confessed, he had heard her talking to her phone, summing up the ideas she was having by looking to the cliff. Then, unexpectedly, he put one hand in one of her shoulders and told her not to worry about anything. Artists had to create and find themselves before bringing people into their worlds. It was just a matter of time and patience.

 All the way home, Kate had a big smile on her face.

Who We Are

   I don’t believe it. I just can’t. The pure concept of a “community” is, for me, just nonsense. If there were a community, any kind, they would be there to stop all atrocities and crimes from happening. But that’s not the case, is it? This world is rotting at a formidable speed and there’s nothing that can stop it. It’s just the way it is. Is it intentional or did no one see the signs we are just fucked?

 People say, often, that we live better now than others did fifty or a hundred years ago. That is obvious. Any person with half a brain, more than most people use, would know that. But I’m not talking about the comforts of life; I’m talking about people as people. We have gone down the drain and gotten worse with time. Of course, not to wonder much about it as humanity has been capable of killing itself in mass. What comes after that then?

 Yeah, yeah… “Humanity has done great things too”. Well, really? Medicine they say… Well why do you think we advance in medicine if it’s not for lengthening our lives, to be able to be more powerful, more than the bags filled with gas that we are? Medicine does not exist to make life better but to make it longer. The innocent that thinks that vaccines and medications are made to take care of the frail and hopeless, are just too innocent to see what’s really going on.

 So, what comes after we have killed so many of ourselves? Well, hate of course. People hate they are free from xenophobia, free from actual hate, senseless and insane. Well, we’re not. We all hate something or someone. We might not consider ourselves racists, but we still fear the people that oppressed us and those who we oppressed. It’s only natural, after generations that behave like animals. Now it’s us who have to be scared of the world around us, which has gotten more dangerous.

 And why is that, we may ask? Well, precisely because people in the past did so much to prove they were above others. Little stupid groups claiming they were in possession of universal truth, telling people how to live their lives, who to admire, who to loath and even what to eat, how to eat and when to eat it. Sounds insane? That’s because it is. We praise the human brain so much but the truth is our biology is so easy to influence. So much that today it’s not hard to make someone ill, make them have a headache or make them sick to their stomachs. We can even kill someone without using a real weapon. We are weak.

 The interesting thing is that we just won’t admit hoe fucked we are. People are killed all over the place, disease comes and takes a shitload of people and many are still denied the same rights as others. Nevertheless, less important “news”, that aren’t new at all, invade the papers to make us feel fear and hope at the same time. The grand media folk make us love someone and hate others. They just shift the pieces of the puzzle and make up dozens of variations on the same subject. So there’s a little bit for everyone but the truth, the real one, is always lost forever, known to no one, not even to the ones that make her disappear.

 It is true we live better than before. But that is because we have been taught what to think of society and we have learned the model we live by is just the best because they haven’t create a better one. Haven’t they? May there be something better? Who knows? We are in no capacity of knowing that because even the most “perfect” place in the world is deprived of something. And whatever it is, it makes that “community” and incomplete one.

 Take for instance rich people in a rich country. They can buy all they want but any of us know that that’s not very important at the end of the day. No, not because it doesn’t matter. Try to live life without money on this planet. No, it’s more because we don’t really fill our head with riches. We fill it with experiences and those who make us feel better are not specially attached to money.

 Many, for example, seek for love. The one true love. Most people are so enthralled with the idea of “real love” that they don’t even stop to think what that means. How do I feel love? Does it feel the same for everyone? And here’s comes the real news: no, it doesn’t. It is a fact that feelings are chemicals reactions happening in the brain. Rats can feel pleasure if we put some electrodes on it and influence the right area of its brain. Same thing can be done with humans. But feelings are more than that. Why? Because they are stored inside our heads and have consequences beyond the mere experience.

 When we love, hate or feel curiosity, we feel something. But we also create from that. A relationship is made by what you remember and what you don’t. And all of this is classified: this is good, this is bad, and this is weird. We keep it in mind and we use it as words or actions if we need it. Those are still feeling but they have stopped being only chemicals in our bodies. We keep them in there if we need to use them.

And we do. But not in a very good way. Humanity has always been very trivial. We have always, in one way or another, loved staring at shiny objects. Whether those are nice precious stones or a beautiful body, we have always idealized what it is to be human. We have grown as a species thinking we are just the best there is because we can speak and walk and conquer. But what’s the use of all of that if don’t have anything to show for ourselves?

 Yes, the discoveries. We cannot deny some humans have gone beyond themselves to explain certain things and create new objects from what nature has given us. That cannot be denied. But another fact that cannot be denied is the fact that most of us have no idea how to create and we are really not interested in it. We created religion precisely to do that. To explain what we, lazy as we are, won’t or can’t explain. Humanity doesn’t like when something cannot be explained and that’s why so many crazy theories exist. We just need to explain, even if the answer is obviously fabricated.

 Then again, we keep killing each other, just because they decided to lie to themselves with different lies that we did or because they eat differently or dress with other clothes. Or just, and we never admit this, because they live far and looks different. This would mean xenophobia but this is the real reason of many wars that humanity has gone through. Just hate, without sense or consideration.

 We fail to see that biologically we are exactly the same. And we are not special. Other creatures walk and breathe and speak. The fact that we don’t understand them doesn’t mean we are better. I won’t go to saying we are the same psychologically because that is a creation of man to explain what’s inside one’s head. And the explanations, often, are as ridiculous as the explanations the ancients have for why the sun was up there with the moon.

 No, the best we can do in this world is acknowledge that we are different, even unique, inside our heads but that we are all the same outside of them. Of course, this doesn’t bring any peace of mind to anyone but nature rarely cares about that. We are just one species on a small particle of dust in the vast universe. And we fail to realize that daily, we fail to see we don’t really matter in the broader context of time and space.

 This doesn’t mean we should just go in deep depression and die. It means we should really live, like real people would do. Let’s just not get into the lives of others and let’s try to learn from each other’s differences that reside inside our heads. If we took a moment learning about what others do in life and what they think on certain important matters (not politics, of course), we would see how similar we are, even inside our heads. That’s the surprise of it all.

 We are not unique, special or precious. We are flawed, simple and unimportant. But we are here and that’s what really matters.  

Afterlife

He wasn't stopping, not even to breathe. It was amazing and awful, incredible and horrible. He had entered the church, were members of the Cataclysm Circle had come to take shelter after the Alliance had pushed them from one side to the other of the Arno river.

We were exhausted but he, the Creature some called it, seemed to be unstoppable, never being tired, not thinking his actions more than once. He was driven by anger, despair and grief. Just pain, that was it for him and it showed.

No one really knew how, but he could use all the power of his mind. With only thinking of it, he elevated people from the ground ant threw them across the room, not caring if they broke their necks or their legs. He was merciless and no one tried to stop him, at least not us.

He had been known as Adrian. He was a legend of the war as he and a rather small group of people had died activating a bomb inside the castle were the supreme chief of the Cataclysm Circle lived. They had been able to destroy the core of the organization but that didn't seem to hurt them as much as everyone had thought. Not all members of the Alliance had died back then, some of them knew who he was and that's why some still referred to him as Adrian.

Now, that dead man was throwing people from one side to the other, choking them with his mind and stopping their hearts. In the storming of the Circle's castle, many people he loved had died. His most beloved person in the world among those. He had never wanted for all of them to be there. He had actually told the Council that he had a way to get inside without being detected, nor the bomb, and that he would use that in his advantage to destroy them

But the Council saw it as a way to become a hero and they didn't wanted any of that so they formed a team of six people to penetrate the rebel base and a latter group of thirty to knock out any remaining machines or communications of the Circle's core with the rest of the organization.

Thirty people died that day, high in the Alps, so far away from anything. Including him, or so it seemed. His body was sent to Vaduz, as the Alliance closest base was there. So many bodies, from so many parts of the continent. And there was word of so many more elsewhere.

But Adrian was not a normal human being. A week after his death, he woke up in a huge storage building. No bodies had been buried yet as there was nowhere to do it. Luckily for Adrian, anyhow. He stood up there, in the middle of the place and cried in silence. He knew he was never supposed to come back but he did anyway. Before guards realized he was inside, he saw the familiar faces he had loved so much and his tears were simply not enough for the pain he felt.

And now, he had already finished his raid on the church. Fellow soldiers entered the place and scouted for survivors or men Adrian had maybe missed. But no, that wasn't the case. Everyone there was dead and he knew it.

Without saying a word, he had vanished. No one worried though, because he always came back.

Weeks later, word was that he had meet with the Council. If gossip was to be believed, they were not very happy to hear he had massacred all the Circle's soldiers inside the church. They told him that the Alliance didn't wanted the world to think they would do just about anything to stop their enemies. They told Adrian that they couldn't be linked with a person which such a particular background, so he needed to calm down in order to join them in future missions.

Well, the rest was not gossip as many people heard Adrian himself speak. He exited the room were the meeting was being held and got to the main hall, were many people were working with wounded or preparing strategies. He told everyone he would be leaving the Alliance to work by his own account. He encouraged everyone to defeat the Cataclysm Circle, fast and with little or no casualties.
Adrian told them he had to much hate inside and that no person working to accomplish a goal should be driven by hatred.

What happened after, again, was subject of interpretation and depended on the information people received from few that claimed to have seen Adrian. Some fisherman in Norway, claimed he had travelled by foot to Bergen. There, a fish saleswoman claimed he had worked for her for some time until he decided to leave for the Americas, or so she claimed he told her.

But no one in that side of the world ever said anything about a man with extraordinary powers. Many, even after the war had ended, insisted on finding him. They were sure he couldn't die and possibly not age, either. So he had to be alive somewhere. Those people looking for him desperately, were the ones disappointed with the new government, which had failed to guarantee basic rights and many other things they had fought for. They believed Adrian could bring them that freedom they wanted, so they looked for him.

Years passed until a farmer in eastern Iceland claimed to have been helped by a man that seemed ravaged by war. He claimed the man didn't spoke at all but he volunteered with signs to work for him, helping with the sheep and the pigs. The farmer told papers that he was the best worker he had ever had. When asked what happened with that man, the farmer said he didn't know. He just disappeared on day, after finishing his chores.

Almost a decade after that event, even less people remembered Adrian and his exceptional mind. Only a small group of people insisted on finding him. They would travel around with their own money to look for clues of Adrian's whereabouts.

They finally found an old fisherman that claimed to have been saved by a merman, off the coast of Greenland. The small group of investigators flew to Kangerlussuaq and spoke with the fisherman but they soon believed to have been duped. The story did not make sense and the man was so old he might have been just inventing nonsense.

The fisherman's son told them he always told people that story, and he frankly had no idea why. He even said the merman took care of him for several days but that was ridiculous.

The fisherman's cottage was a little bit far from the main town so the small group stayed there to rest before their journey back home. The fisherman's son prepared a delicious fish stew and they all talked and joked all night long, drinking liquor, having fun without thinking in nothing else.

They left the following morning. After they did so, the fisherman's son went back to his usual duties: caring of the man that had actually saved him before becoming senile. He had saved him from drowning and the man responded by giving him a home and support. Adrian would never forget that.