Cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor

Yes, the title of this blog is in Spanish, my native language and is taken from "Coplas por la muerte de su padre" by Spanish Poet Jorge Manrique (1440-1479). And, what is wrong with that sentence? For starters it is not the full sentence but to make things worse I believe that many people live by it, specially when becoming adults. They think that infancy or adolescence or youth in general was better. And if life just happens to take them to a different part of the world, the places they were before were better. Things do not stop here. There is yet another popular Spanish sentence "recordar es vivir", or my own translation: "to remember is to live".

But now, let me be the defense attorney of the Poet. His full sentence was: "como a nuestro parecer cualquiera tiempo pasado fue mejor", which is better interpreted by the English Translation "How fain is memory to measure each latter day inferior to those of old". By the way, the English sentence can't be chopped the way the Spanish version can. The corresponding part of the English translation wouldn't make sense.

There is no denying that the Spanish poet was indeed saddened by his father death. I was too when my father passed away. I have also been saddened when diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. But even in such situations, the poet and I found that life is worth living, because every moment is precious. There are so many people and reasons to keep going and enjoying, that these difficult moments are just that, moments; but life goes on and so does the life of the loved ones. Why wasting our time and our mental energy in remembrance of times that will never come back. As the idea I wrote in a previous blog, we must make our present so pleasant that we will remember it with joy, but not try to stick to a past that we only remember fragmentarily or ... conveniently.

And the suspense continues...

No, the neurologist could not make a diagnostic yet. One more lab test. It seems that my movility limitation is more evasive than I thought, and the uncertainty, of course, is not pleasant. Treatment cannot start yet, whatever it might be. In the mean time, I'll just keep on doing my regular exercise routine every morning. I guess that if I donot know what it is I might as well try to keep as healthy and strong as I can. But enough about my health. And as usual, while life presents a challenge, I also get good news. I was promoted today, so all in all balance prevails.

I believe, in my last blog I left some arguments unfinished. Although I don't think I'll ever finish them, at least I will try to complement them as I blog away. Someone may have thought with reason that my optimism is not typical of an existentialist and I wouldn't argue against that because I wouldn't like to be typical of anything, except being typical of myself. What I argue is that existentialism is pragmatic. I live my present to the fullest. If I can't change my past, not even what I have just lived a few microseconds ago, why should that worry me? Someone could argue that I was typing my blog and that I could've deleted and writen something else. That's something I do often, but that doesn't change the past, only changes the text that I wrote but I can't go and "unwrite" or change the reasons why I wrote what I wrote in the first place or why I changed it later on. The only thing I can do is trying to learn from the past so that I don't make the same mistakes again. But that even may not be quite simple sometimes.

And what about the future? The future is not happening yet, so in a sense it doesn't exist. Present, which I would think is "unmeasurable", is unraveling as I go on with my life. No matter how much I plan, future does not exist. Only the present and what I do with it shapes my life. It doesn't mean that I don't plan. I do plan, but I can only act on the present and make things so that what I plan might become true. But not even that ensures I will achieve what I plan. Just two years ago, it didn't cross my mind that I would have my current limitation, so how could I have planned for this. An insurance agent would say, you could have bought a disability insurance policy. But not even that would've stopped me from getting mi movility limitation. I just have it in the present. Would I have it in the future? Probably, but not certainly. Maybe it's curable, maybe not. Whenever I know, if I ever know, I will just have information about what it is and how should I act. But my acts only exist in the present.

Well I feel I have to leave this unfinished, again, but my present is demanding me to take the action of going and picking up my daughters which, by the way, is a beautiful present.