Amazing Grace

Amazing the way we build our lives. Amazing the people we let in and out. And we are the sum of those encounters that we write in chapters, some long, others consisting of only a few paragraphs. But, still, they are there, they all mean something because everybody that crosses our path means something: we just, most often, don't know what exactly.

And then, what is also amazing, is that we have the tremendous ability to write simultaneous chapters in our lives. That is fascinating, when happiness and sadness coexist and we learn from both. Amazing how we can be happy and sad in equal measure in the same moment in time.

The Present itself is an amazing instance trapping us between the Past that we know and the Future we imagine or anticipate or even fear. I used to like looking back at the Past, I don't anymore. No matter how happy I was at any given moment in the Past, I simply don't want to go through the, in my mind always painful, process of revisiting what is no longer. It's like cutting an umbilical chord: it hurts, either because it was too good and it doesn't exist anymore, we lost it, or because it was bitter and revising it causes anguish and pain.

I'm looking forward for the Future, the near Future, the immediate next weeks. In a way, in a very ironic way, the way so peculiar Life has of teaching us, I'll be somehow reliving things of my immediate Past. So ironic! Yet, different circumstances, different people, will necessarily lead to a different chapter, not a rewriting of an old, almost closed, chapter. Maybe the lines that will be written can overcome the ones already written, I don't know. Maybe...

I'll be a foreigner again. The one I've always been, here and in the country I was born. I'll be mixing with them, the foreigners, and be one of them. I'll lose my language and sense of place and I'll be happy (God, so many reasons to be happy!). The endless possibilities the Future holds, the joy of blank pages waiting to be written. I like blank pages. I live my life filling blank pages with words. I like words, I like beautiful sentences, I like punctuation marks and deciding whether to use a colon or a comma. What chapter am I writing now? What will I write in it? How will I fill its pages? This is the anticipation, the amazing anticipation before the Unknown, the yet unlived.

Surpreendente também que uns fiquem nas mesmas páginas, reescrevendo parágrafos e capítulos em circunvoluções e que outros virem páginas e acrescentem a Novidade da Vida. Que entediante seria se a Vida não fosse escrita mas reescrita... e reescrita outra vez... e outra...