VARIATIONS ON A THEME BY THE CHILEAN WRITER ISABEL ALLENDE. Inspired, extracted (plagiarized) and paraphrased from her novel “The Daughter of Fortune”, Plaza y Janes Editores SA, Barcelona, 1999, pp 296-301.
Some of us have for too long lived surrounded by four walls, in an immutable environment, where time rolls in circles and the line of the horizon where we are heading to in our work is barely perceptible. We have grown up professionally inside an impenetrable armor of good manners and conventionality.
We have been trained to please and serve, and ended up limited by our own routines, the prevailing social norms and our hidden fears. For too long, fear has been our companion: fear of authority and of what people will say, fear of the unknown and of what is different, fear of the unpredictability of social justice, fear of leaving the protected cocoon and facing the dangers of the real world out there, fear of our own fragility and of the ultimate truth.
Our truth has been a sweetened-up truth, made of omissions, courteous silences, well kept secrets, order and discipline -while masses of the poor share the same space and time with us, yet it is as if they did not exist for us. And under such circumstances, our aspiration has really been more to achieve virtuosity. But now we are beginning to doubt the significance of that word.
As this doubt assaults some of us, we are waking up. We do not know in what turn of the road traveled we lost the person we used to be. Looking back, we are not sure anymore which of the causes we championed were meaningful, which we won and which we lost. If we made some mistakes and had uncertainties and fears about the future, we feel we have paid dearly for them already.
We feel new wings growing on our shoulders; we feel we can fly like a condor; we feel suddenly empowered; a new arrogance allowing us to make meaningful decisions in our professional lives is overtaking us, and we are willing to pay the consequences for it. We feel we do not owe an explanation to anyone for these changes.
An atavic, seldom before felt sense of optimism and commitment invades some of us. We have lost that sensation of multiple fears always sitting in the mouth of our stomachs. Our fears have melted as we have lost our fear of fear. We now find new strengths as we face new risks. We are finding new forces within ourselves that we probably always have had, but did not know we had, because we had never used them. We are ready to join the growing number of explorer-doers seeking new ways out to the problems of the world. We feel pride as wo/men who are reinventing equity.
Some of us walk victorious while others still carry disillusions mostly having early defeats to show for. But we feel we own our destinies, our future, and our own irrevocable newly acquired dignity. We finally understand talk about liberation, about rights and empowerment, and about freedom from want in new ways and yearn to discuss with others what we see and feel about each of them.
We can now live each day without necessarily making plans that are not worth spending our lives on. We feel we have a blank sheet in front of us where we can write our new plans and, in the process, become whoever we want to become, without anybody judging our past. In short, we can be reborn.
Claudio Schuftan, Saigon.
schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript;
Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors. (T. Henry Huxley)