New Year

With one last day left of 2012 ahead tomorrow, all I can think of is what has past and what is left to live next year. This year has been full of struggles as every one, but struggles get bigger each year, but that is what comes with growing up.
I tried to label this year but I found it to be a quite difficult task. I´ve learnt, I loved, I made mistakes and I regreted. Just like every year this was full of unexpected events, ideas left to put into practice and a big moral. For me, this year, there are two morals. The first moral was "Do whatever pleases and makes YOU happy, in the end it is YOUR life you are living, not anybody elses´. The second one is "Take chances. Life doesn´t have rules, and you ARE expected to fail so as to succed."
I spent too much time thinking about what others might think abut anything that I did or thought. I´ve spent this whole year on it and I dont wish my 2013 to be anything like it. Taking chances is the second step, life is full of parts which aren´t known, left to discover and explore, and if we never try, we will never know.
I take with me what I learnt and all my mazing experiences from this year. All the negative is left behind.

Mottos for this year: 
"Be yourslef, everybody else is taken."
"Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and focus on what could go right."
"The happiest people don´t have everything. they make the best of everything they have."
"Do more of what makes you happy"

I wonder what the world has for me this 2013.
At least I know that I have 365 opportunities,  previous years of experiences of all kinds and a blank slate with a big label that says "2013" on it.
Best wishes for this New Year,
 Luli Miri

You need two to tango

They stand face to face. Walk towards each other .When their eyes meet they know they are ready and the music starts to play. The audience is amazed by how synchronized they look. The man leads, but it would be graceless without her hooks and eights. All of this, blend together in the typical argentinian TANGO music.

Thoughts and feelings dance together, but you couldn’t do without them both taking turns to lead. What do I mean by this?  Thoughts and feelings complement each other, when you think too much, there’s no room for emotions to flow. Imagine you are walking on your own on a dark alley at night. You hear footsteps behind you. Your heart starts beating faster, your hands are shaking and covered in sweat. You are afraid and run all the way to the next block where you see light. At that moment, out of danger, you realize you were afraid that someone would hurt you and decided to run. Two minutes before, you couldn’t have put your feelings into words because your emotions overwhelmed you and that was the way it could have been. If you were to start thinking instead of running I wonder what would have happened to you. Maybe you could have turned around and you would have realized the “supposed footsteps” were some shutters banging with the wind….However you could have also turned around to face a dangerous murderer pointing at you with a gun and in that case it would be too late!

There’s a link between emotion action and thought. Every event that defines an action either follows or will be followed by both an emotional response and a thought.

You are sad or angry and accidentally you shout to your mother; then you start thinking about it and how wrong you were. Here we have a FEELING, ACTION, THOUGHT link. Otherwise this “chain: could start with the action; so, you shout to your mother, you think about it and then you feel sorry afterwards. Finally everything can start with a thought, for example thinking your mum might be upset because of how you treated her; then it it followed by an action as you go and talk to her and finally you feel better after exchanging a few words with her and saying sorry.

Sometimes it’s the emotion who’s leading the way, and this is more evident when we let go of all rational thought and act impulsively. The best example that comes to mind would be that 5 cm above the floor feeling you get when you are in love.

Of course, then comes the fall. And no matter how many times we hit the ground, there we go again!

I refuse to think that we are irrational beings, but then again, why do we behave as if logic didn’t matter when we should be the most careful? We know that falling in love actually includes Falling, and we keep on falling in love!

Yet, the only thing that really differentiates us from other species is the fact that we have the chance to choose and not to act upon mere instinct, so I must conclude that the whole process of balancing our thinking and rational self with our emotional being is not without purpose.

After all, we do need two for tango

Why?

  The world is a whole mystery.  Life is really a mystery. Why? Isn't that the question that we ask ourselves the most? At least I do, but I never get many answers. We don't have time. No time to think, question, reflect. Why? Why do we keep on asking if we never get the answer? Why do we keep on struggling to know every single detail?

 Since day one we touch, experiment, investigate, look around trying to understand. We've been always trying to understand how. How energy flows, how particles move, how the sky is blue. I believe that every single person has a mission in the world, we are not here to follow the crowd, we are here to discover, change.

  What are you here for? Haven't you always wondered? Are we here to create? To question? To learn? I have always believed in each single person being one tiny chance to change the human perspective of life. I am sure that there is a lot more in life than what we get nowadays. Life was once something else, a different concept, it was what you made from it.

    Each day our lives become more structured. I refuse to think that we are born, we go to school, we study a career, maybe form a family, get old and finally we die.

Why do we agree with this? Why do we let ourselves be controlled by a government? Why are we so structured in everything? Maybe we know so much that we cannot appreciate what life is really about, what we want to achieve in it, not what we have to. We might think that life is now right just the way it is, but how can we be so sure if we don't know how a different world would taste? We only know this way of living, the one we are used to. We need to find a new way that focuses on what we want, and in making the most out of life in every single day without

stopping.

   You can do it. We can do it.

   What do you want? I want to control my own destiny.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul. -

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed. -

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate;

I am the captain of my soul.

   William Ernest Henley wrote this poem, when he was in hospital with tuberculosis. He contracted a tubercular infection that led to his leg being amputated below the knee. Later on the same thing happened to the second one, but he refused to have it amputated. He sought for the help of a new doctor who had developed an antiseptic medicine and almost two years later he got out of hospital. Those times were dark for Henley, and we can really appreciate that in this poem.

   Even in horrible circumstances, Henley refused to let life defeat him, but instead he rose up and fought back. He did not waste his time crying over what he had lost, but instead focused on getting better. He refused to submit to the idea that someone else was in control of his life.

I keep on repeating to myself. "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul".

Nelson Mandela was inspired by this poem. He helped bring equality to South Africa being a Negro. That is my role model, someone who makes the impossible possible.

   Why? Why should we do this? Why should we listen to this thirteen-year-old girl? How is she even so sure about something so complicated?

    " Sometimes it's not the questions that are hard, it's the answers."

    We might need to stop questioning a bit, and live.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”

― Oscar Wilde

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

Values

For a long time, humans have searched for a life that lasts forever, but every time it lasts even less…Living forever is far away from our reach now. Life works with money now, not happiness, not very much with health. The poorer die young and the wealthy die, but already when they are old enough to. That is really unfair. Do we ever ask ourselves why this is so?  Why do we allow this to keep working like this?

When I was younger, maybe between ages 4 to 10, I used to give tons of things to charity, even though I still do, it is not the same. Before I was a lot more enthusiastic about it, but now other interests have conquered my mind. Maybe this is the time when young adults start changing their minds and after that when they are older they have that incorporated so they can’t change it. I was taught really well by my both my parents, but now a lot more by my mother, but though she still tries hard for me to focus on my values, she fails constantly. Now you may wonder, so if this girl knows her mum tries hard for her to focus on her values, why doesn’t she try harder? That is exactly my point, since at this age we lose values so badly it is really hard to go back, just like smoking; you know it is bad for you but it isn’t really easy to quit. Teenagers start losing lots of their values and maybe their giving back habits and it causes adults to behave in that way when we grow up. Yes, there are people who do care a lot, and that luckily don’t lose any of their values but I am just generalizing. So, going back to my point, I believe that if our society doesn’t have teenagers with values, good habits, and good manners, when they grow up into adults they won’t be really different, and might be worse.

I happen to be one of those who still remain, and I am proud to say it, with most of them.  I am lazy to tidy up my room, to get all my old clothes in a bag to take to the church for the holiday seasons, but I still do it.  Back to my original point, “the poorer die young and the wealthy die old”. Now, it is all about money. Money is everywhere we go; our world is about that, I would now rather say that our planet rotates around a golden coin instead of a star... I am not really lucky when I go to school because of the classmates I have. When it comes to debating about the poor people and how we can help they just laugh and bother because, of course, they are not interested, it is none of their business. Some of them would really want to participate but if they do they might be exposed to social suicide, just for participating.  I would say that they don’t have an idea of what life is about and in the world they live in, considering my age I believe I am a fortunate girl because of knowing a bit and being grateful about it. So, my classmates aren’t that grateful for their amazing education at the school I go to, and commit lots of vandalizing. That reminds me of one of the teachers telling us that kids at public schools, the ones that aren’t that good, care for what they do have a lot, because they know what it is like to be in lack of lots of material you need for school for example.  This made me so upset and got me thinking so much at that time, though I still do frequently.  What if we switched schools? I bet they wouldn’t make it to a day in there, and the other kids who’d be in our school would’ve loved it.

I would love all those people who are so selfish  to live one day as a person who doesn’t have anything at all. Would they manage? Would they survive?  I wonder what that would really be like.

Some of my friends if I ever talk about this just say, you have your own computer, a mobile phone, an iPod, a camera, you have no right to say that, but I earned those things, I bought them with my own money, or they were gifts for my school performance throughout the years. I am still really humble about what I have, and I am really grateful for everything I get, and for every single detail that my parents add to my life.  Just because I have a lot doesn’t mean I don’t know how to care for it, and be thankful for it. I was brought up as a Christian so I really know about that, and still keep everything I learned from that with me though I am not Christian anymore.

Sometimes I wonder why is our world constantly worried about money? Why do they think about it so much? Is it that terrible being an adult? Or is it just that they can’t find their path to the right decisions sometimes?

People sometimes are so involved in money issues that they end up being really mean, self centered, selfish, etc. Money really does change people, and maybe we should stop using it, though we can’t but I would love to live the moment instead of worrying about how much will living the moment cost.

Am I the only one getting tired?

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria 

Natural Selection in Society

For the ones who haven’t heard about it, “natural selection” is Darwin’s famous theorem.  It can be explained as survival of the fittest as well. I first thought about it just as a theory for animals, plants, not humans, but I was wrong. Yes, it is not that much like it in humans, but I would definitively consider it so. 

How can this happen to us? Lets picture high school environment, if you are up to date with all the trends, all the slang used, all the music everyone listens to, then you are “fit”, lets avoid saying being “cool”, since if you are fit and cool then you are the one that is most likely to be the one who survives. 

On the other side, you might not be the one who parties every weekend, the one with the coolest clothes, you might be a “geek”, a “freak”, or any of the labels that people use on others who are different.

What happens to these persons? Do they survive? This time our answer has to do with why I consider this “natural selection” in our society really similar to the one for wildlife. We might not die because of this, but we suffer and go through lots of changes such as:  personality, appearance, ways of thinking, desires, basically our true selves change radically just for acceptance.

Personally, I can tell that it is difficult to go back. For girls it is really important to be like a Barbie, perfect, pretty and thin, to be up to date with all the trends, and not intelligent. I admit I love each and every of my English classes, no matter what subject it is, and I could never accept that with my friends around, but once I discovered the people that were a good influence to me, this changed and I started being myself again.

How does this work? Why did it start working? All that matters now is if you are pretty, thin, etc, no one cares much about personality or intelligence, not anymore.  Joining the choir, drama club, or orchestra is not well seen anymore and you can be judged about it, and not even mentioning  joining chess clubs, or playing games such as “dungeons and dragons”.

What is considered geeky? Maybe fantasizing with working at Microsoft, enjoying reading a book, being member of a club where you debate about a video game, having friends on internet, enjoying jigsaw puzzles, wearing glasses, between others.

I will never worry about ruling the world, I just care about the world not ruling me. I am not worried anymore about being called: nerd, geek, freak, or weird. It doesn’t bother me anymore.

                   “I’m not weird, I’m limited edition.”

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

Learned Helplessness

Learned Helplessness is a phenomenon easily found in both academics, and social scenes. This phenomenon is caused when someone fails at something once, he tends to apply that to every single thing that he does in the future, causing him to feel often frustrated, stupid, not useful, etc. 

When I start thinking about this I picture myself sometimes, I can remember moments for example during my mathematics classes. Watching my classmates saying that they couldn’t understand the tenth point, when I wasn’t even through the first one. Since then I labeled myself as a girl who will always fail at math, someone who will never be able to solve an equation. It is actually really hard when you feel that, not being useful, but after one of my teachers saw me giving up so much on every task, she told me to try once again but harder. It was quite incoherent to me since everyone was so fast at solving them and I had to spend a lot of time on them, but I did just as she told me to, and I solved it.

What is really amazing is that I would have never tried again, and I still have lots of trouble since I am very used to feeling as failure at my math class, if my teacher would have not pushed me through it. Maybe we all need someone to help us do some things, and we might as well need to stop labeling ourselves as failure, useless people, stupid, and others. These can really block our way to succeeding and achieving tons of things. We can’t just stand there without moving, watching how this goes by us…

“Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass, it is about learning how to dance under the rain”

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

Is exterior beauty a must to survive in this world?

Everybody is beautiful in their own way. Sometimes it isn’t so visible so others just never give a chance to those; they just judge them before really knowing them. Exterior beauty might be a good way to start for some, though it shouldn’t.

I am growing up, each time realizing things I never realized before. Everything would be easier if we had kids’ minds. What matters for them is having fun, nothing else, that is their must. Do we really look at ourselves in the mirror? Maybe we do, but just at the physical looks. Do we even realize about how we feel, or even worse, how do we make others feel? You might be looking at a mirror, but possibly not at the right one.

 “It's beauty that captures your attention; personality which captures your heart.”

Every single day since the last couple of months, I feel as if nothing else mattered but the way we look. Teenagers are struggling through disorders just by looking at a magazine and trying to look like the girls in the cover. Not many care about knowledge and studies, and would rather not know anything about it to look better.

Whenever I think about this question I go back in time to when I was in kindergarten. I used to watch the beauty and the beast over and over again. I wish that arrogant and egocentric people, just like the prince in the first part of the movie, were all transformed into beasts to understand that not everything is the looks, but that only happens in fairy tales, in this world we have to realize everything on our own, or what would be worse, by someone else.

It is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly.”  - Oscar Wilde.

Oscar Wilde was a writer who criticized everyone, even himself and the society he lived in. His books reflect his craziness but you could tell that he knew far more than everyone else in that time. That didn’t mean he was right in everything but he could understand everything, or at least the most common mistakes or actions that a man does during his life.

Why do we still struggle to reach to the answer? Why do people still try to be beautiful when they already are?

Beauty seems a must in this world, but it is really not one. The one who only cares about how good someone else looks, doesn’t really care about nothing else other than that.

“People like people who look good .Anyone who says otherwise is either dumb or ugly.” – Beastly

I heard that quote on a movie some days ago… I couldn’t understand how there are actually people who think that and totally agree with it. Later on I heard this one:

“I am substance over style.”-Beastly

That is what people who don’t judge with their eyes say, the ones who choose soul before looks.

There was a myth I read weeks ago for a class, in which a man pulled of his eyes from his face since he couldn’t realize that he had killed his father and married his own mother.

I am starting to have my doubts about sight. It might reflect perfectly what is happening but careful, because not everything is what it seems. Sight can reflect how PRETTY a person is, but never how BEAUTIFUL he/she is. In that sense blinds have an advantage, they don’t see beauty but they feel it.

By: Lucia Miri  Echavarria

A world of comments and critics

Not every once in a while we get the chance to open our eyes. Lets face it, we all make mistakes. We all judged someone. We are not perfect, but we can change.

Human dignity is something that, in my opinion, is nowadays lost. Racism, prejudices, judgments, and much more are taking over our lives. Why do we allow this to happen? Do we feel insecure of ourselves that we have to criticize others?

Bullies. That was a famous word during my years in primary. I used to come back from school crying because people were mean to me. They enjoyed making people suffer, and the worst part…children didn’t stand up for themselves. They are afraid.

It is a world of comments and critics. Everything is about doing what is well seen, about pleasing people. Why? Today we only want to fit in everywhere. We don’t want to feel the shame of sitting on our own in the bus, to work without partner; while everybody has one…We need acceptance, and it seems that we are capable of changing our personality just for a bit of it.

Tolerance:  The capacity for or the practice of recognizing and respecting the beliefs or practices of others.

That is a definition everybody should know. We should all be tolerant. We don’t have to like everybody, just tolerate them.

I am different, and people laughed at me because of that, but how to overcome them is not trying to make them good people.

"You laugh at me because I'm different; I laugh at you because you're all the same."

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria

Life

Life: 4 letters and tons of definitions. If I had to define WHAT life really is, I wouldn´t be able to express it, words wouldn´t be enough.

Life is about learning new things, going through unexpected experiences and learning from them.

It is about teaching and sharing. There is always somebody willing to learn and who could use some advice. Maybe somebody who is lost and needs help to get back on track.

In this everlasting road we may lose track, but life is also about that. It is about getting lost and getting back home, having grown with your experience. Having experienced a new picture of what you thought had only one view.

There is always room for dreamers. We must dream in order to accomplish goals, and believe me in order to dream you have to let yourself dream as high as possible. Dreams do not have to look “reasonable”! Lets not forget that to dream you also need to try. “If you never try, you´ll never know”.

In order to succeed with our dreams, or whatever we want to accomplish, we must make mistakes. Nobody has succeeded without failing first. Failing is as important, or even more, than succeeding, because in the end you don’t only succeed but you learn as well.

In life we give and we get. I once read that “generosity can go farther than the person you give to. By giving, you teach others how to give also”, and eventually you will get and hopefully that encourages you to give once again.

We trust, we hurt and get hurt, we remember, we forget and move on. When we trust we take chances. We believe in the other enough. Sometimes we get hurt because things might not turn up just as we thought they would. We will remember and learn from our disappointment and find relief as soon as we forget. Sometimes disappointment leaves us scars and we cannot forget, but we move on and we decide to acknowledge our past in order to accept what the future holds for us. Sometimes we might even forgive, but that is something you decide. Decisions in life are one of the most difficult, but important tasks we take care of.

In life we protect and connect with what and who we love. We listen, tolerate, admire and thank.

We lie and betray. We might lie to protect but in the end betray, but not only those two are important…we also hurt. Maybe all of these are connected to failing in a way, but as I said before…failing is an essential part of life, for without it we will not succeed.

We discover and experience the world and its mysteries and every little bit that comes with it. We smile, enjoy…we fall in love, we commit, we feel and transmit. Happiness isn’t easily achieved in life, but you will be truly happy when you do what you want to do, with whoever you wish, whenever and wherever without concentrating in nobody else but yourself and your desires. And lets be honest, who said that what “is right” is good? ENJOY.

In life we simply are. Never forget who you are and never stop doing what you love the most to do. You are here for that reason. It is YOUR life.

In life you laugh, cry, fail, succeed, lie, discover, smile, procrastinate, get hurt, make mistakes, admire, get lost, move on, grow, teach, learn, dream, decide, trust, forget, remember , get, give, feel, try and so many others…but remember, in order to LIVE you must BE.

Let yourself freely BE in order to truly BE.

Take chances, insist, transmit, think, create, do, get expectations, watch, understand, admit, encourage and decide.

In the end, you are who you decide to be. The only one in control of yourself is nobody else but you.

Live.

Life is too complicated to define it. Just bear in mind that life is what you make it.

Lucia Miri Echavarria

Delapidated

Darkness, dust and ashes from what had been before were all around, destroying the symphony of a past that will never be back and making space for a new place where my life would take place. Torn walls, bridges falling down and the sun that would never pop out to illuminate my reality.

This place was once different. I remember smiles everywhere when my youth was around, but all that's dead and gone now. There was sun and constant rising walls, bridges were built and children would sing.

But how? Easy. We might sometimes think that it isn't easy to lose something we took so long in achieving but, believe me, it is. Just like trust, it is earned by actions and care it is also lost with only one mistake, one distraction.

My paradise looked perfect but it could be even better. I would close my eyes and project it. I would see all of the prettiest paradises merged together in mine and when I opened my eyes i saw it. Reality was even worse than what I thought. My paradise was awful. I knew it could be better, it had to.

I started imagining what my paradise would look like; I closed my eyes and what felt like seconds of this daydream turned into years.

I could see it, every single day my paradise got better, but nobody said a word about it. I wouldn't understand why. I considered envy as an option a kept on struggling to make it even more perfect. There were green and tall pines that would touch the sky. Flowers were everywhere; there were different types and colors. I would feel their scent and the buzzing of the hungry bees anywhere i went. I ran. I ran through fields of golden sunflowers and felt their unique touch all over my body as I admired the everyday sunset that would introduce me to a new scenery. A dark starry night which would lead me to my new partner for the next hours, the moon. We would dance with joy over my upcoming success in the evolution of my perfect paradise. People would still not compliment, but I could feel their whispers behind my back and the amused expressions they'd use. Everyday was a lullaby. The same lullaby over and over again. It started getting monotonous, people left, silence crept in and then...I closed my eyes so as to rest.

I felt heat around me; dust would get into my nose. I had found myself lying, not on the grassy pastures, but on a cold dusty ground. I opened my eyes.

Fire. It was everywhere those tall imperial pines that stood beside me were gone, under burning fearful flames. The scent from the flowers was nothing else than incredible amounts of smoke, and the buzzing bees were saws chopping the pines down. The sunflowers, my golden field...it had disappeared completely. They were dead from lack of sun and watering. I had fallen asleep daydreaming about "perfect". I used to have a paradise, it wasn't perfect, but it was real. It took me hard work and patience. Now everything I had was under my judgmental thumb because of its lack of perfection. The whispers I felt and the expressions of amusement I saw were warning calls so that I woke up and looked at my neglected paradise. It was getting worse, and I didnt realize in time, for now it is too late to return and it will never be back as it was. It took so much time dreaming about perfect, that I forgot to take care of what I already had.

I sat down and watched how everything started disappearing every single day. It is still burning. I built myself a little hideaway to provide me shelter from all the dust and ashes that could bother me, but it is weak and permeable and things still do slip in.

I will always be here, waiting for this fire to stop burning, the sun to come out and someone to save me from this hell I used to call PARADISE.

By: Lucia Miri Echavarria