Wrapping up my workday, I went out for a walk before the sun went down. And I thought I’d share something that happened during my day.
I’ve been wanting to record more videos, and I had been thinking about upgrading my phone, getting one with a better camera. “With a better camera, I’ll feel more motivated to record videos.” I spent two days like that, mulling it over, until I said: man, what I need isn’t a phone to record videos. What I need is to record videos, plain and simple! My phone has a perfectly good camera.
Keeping this phone won’t bring failure. But actually recording videos might make my project succeed. Success not in the sense of getting famous — that’s not it. What I want is to share my views of the world, to reflect much more, and to gain new views of the world through sharing. Because in order to speak, I will have to think. And I will grow from that.
So I want to focus more on what I need to do than on what I need to have.
The water and the pores
It’s like the story of reading philosophy. If you read philosophy non-stop, does that mean you understood it? Maybe you understood it with reason: you used arguments that led you to a conclusion. But did it actually get inside you? It’s like water you bathed in that stayed only on the surface, on your body, on your skin — or did that water truly enter through your pores and begin to become part of you?
I think that’s how it should be in the realm of ideas: not just coming into contact with ideas, with a philosophical view of the world, but truly bathing in them. Becoming the very water we are in contact with.
It is very important to live a reflective life oriented toward action. Because living a reflective life for its own sake, or for the ego of “look at the philosophers I read, look what a fine thinker I am” — I don’t think that makes sense.
And even though I work with social media, that doesn’t mean picking up a camera and recording comes easily to me. It’s always a struggle. But a satisfaction too, when I see the result: whether the result of the thing itself, finished, or the result of the result — having conversations with other people who tell me it makes sense to them.
Movement generates movement
Something really nice happened today. I posted a video on LinkedIn about Métrica’s 17 years and my four years here at the ecovillage. Someone liked it — the first like — and this person is deeply connected to Métrica.Social’s current moment. Exchanging ideas with him would be great. I opened WhatsApp, started typing his name… and a message from him pops up: “Man, it’s been a while! I saw your video — how about we catch up?” I said: that’s synchronicity, man. I was opening WhatsApp right here, right now, precisely to talk to you.
Movement generates movement. Reflection, sometimes, generates stagnation — just reflecting and reflecting. When you act, you generate more possibilities for action. I’m walking down this road: if I don’t walk down it, I never reach this fork. And with this fork I have the possibility of taking that path, or just going straight. Some things are unexpected; we don’t know what we’ll find beyond what we can currently reach.
The game I play with myself
In this reflection of “I need a phone — no: what I need is to record the video”, sometimes I can create a false expectation, a game I play with myself, that with the new phone I will record. But if I don’t record, I’ll create a frustration for myself. Sometimes it’s just desire for the object. A phone with a better camera is desirable, sure, why not? But I could be putting myself in a position of a certain anguish: “wow, I still haven’t done any of what I said I would do, and I’ve had this phone for a week already.” Then soon enough something happens, work piles up, and I hand myself excuses.
And that’s how these frustrations contaminate us. Sometimes we carry background anxieties we don’t notice, things that sit in our minds for a long time and that, if we don’t stop to reflect, to feel, make us feel anyway — just without the awareness.
Hence the importance of philosophizing in order to act, and acting while philosophizing. Without staying only in the realm of reflection: sometimes it’s plain manual work, nothing to reflect on. I have to press this button 232 times a day? Right: let’s press the button 232 times a day, knowing that this is what I have to do.
Because the walk is not the walking. The walk is the path. And, moving in this way, I keep making the walk my path and my path the walk.
Originally published on my Instagram in September 2024.