Jan 26 • Uncategorized • 11643 Views

Chillida’s Comb of the Winds, San Sebastian.
If you want to know what this blog is about…
This has been a very strange week
Wonderful from the professional point of view but, while everything went so fine for me, life was just hammering people all around. Among other things, I am a personal Maths teacher. I started last year, and getting the first students is pretty hard. Last week I got a new kid because his teacher at the time had fallen seriously ill. This week I got a second one because she died. She was just 31, had studied architecture and life didn’t give her time to find a job on what she had fought so hard to be. Today two kids in their twenties killed themselves against a truck on the turnpike, not 1 minute away from my house. I hate that bend. That part of the turnpike was opened not three years ago and it was just bidding its time, waiting for prey. Today it scored two students. Also today, my little engineering company issued the first two bills in 20 months. First money it makes. On top of all this, my wife learned yesterday one friend of hers has lung cancer. So, all in all, bitter-sweet week, in which I am feeling great but not quite. How could I?
Life is a gift, but it can be nonetheless ruthless. There is a Pearl Jam song titled Sirens that says “it’s a fragile thing this life we lead. If I think too much I can get overwhelmed by the grace by which we live our lives with death over our shoulders”. I think these words explain in a wonderful way what many people do, celebrate life while they are aware, or maybe because they are aware, it is finite, that it can end anytime. It is in days like these, when you are not directly hit but you can see where the bombs are falling, when this feeling surfaces with most intensity. I tell myself, live, man, LIVE! for we never know. For me, LIVING means making the most of each and every day, it means giving love to those around me. It means planing for a long life, but enjoying the present. We won’t be happy next month or year if we don’t learn to live today. LIVE. Try to get rich, but not in money, but in experiences and affection. To help and be helped, to love and be loved, to share… these things cannot be bought, and are the only ones that give life a real meaning. But I am repeating myself.
Many others, however, do not live their lives with grace, but with recklessness, with disrespect, as if they had many lives to live, infinite days to waste. So they allow banal things to spoil their days one after another. We need to LIVE. We need to learn to respect our own lives, to be grateful for all the things we have, and do not have. Things we and take for granted and which are not taken into account until lost.
Life can be ruthless, but it is the most precious gift. It is worth to fight for, to be fully savored, to the last second. In times like these I remember Katixa. A girl, a woman, I never knew. And I honor her.
The following is the translation of something I posted on a forum 19 months ago.
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