Thursday, December 8, 2016

Cloud Atlas and emotions



I'm 54 years old, surprisingly as it might sound, my wife still keeps my company, she even cares about me and we both look after our two kids (12 and 20), my parents,  our dog, Cadí, and our chickens. We live in a house that it's almost finished yet cozy enough for our pains and glories.

My job as a vocational teacher is quite demanding with homework in the morning preparing classes or grading exams and portafolios, and then giving lessons in the afternoon and evening, but mostly I enjoy it. There are very few jobs in which you have the privilege to be extremely creative while surrounded by young people full of energy and desire to leave their mark in the world.

And despite my personal satisfaction, from time to time, the bug of "what had happened if..." bites me and I find myself longing for crossroads gone long ago. Cities and towns left behind, relationships drifting away, a career change, quitting a course... Then I notice my heartbeat slightly speeding up, a preasure in my head, my awareness straying from the here/now and a little knot in my stomach.

I usually get a tight hold of Rhonda's Thank-you-Life! technique to get rid of demons flying around but then, this Wachovski's  movie found me and the script has been so therapeutical and soothing that it could be worth sharing it.

Atlas Cloud's mix of oneness, simultaneity of space and time as well as reincarnaion was not so foreign to Western beliefs. In a way, it looks like we sold our one life's soul to the devil in exchange of this -sometimes fake- sense of liberty, material progress and, for sure, world's leadership in economy and warfare. 

This deal's side effects often involve Westerners' higher heart attack rates, alzeimer, parkinson, cancer and anxiety. Most of our fears are likely rooted on the apparent evidence that we are unique and alone, dismembered from our piers, and gone forever after death. For that reason I like reading this transcript or watching it in context:

Wind like this, full of voices. 
Ancestry howling at you, yibbering stories...
All voices tied up into one... Old Georgie... 
And I'll yarn you about the first time we met... eye to eye...

Our lives are not our own.
From womb to tomb
we are bound to others,
past and present.
And by each crime 
and every kindness,
we birth our future.

Belief, like fear or love, is a force to be understood 
as we understand the Theory of Relativity and Principles of uncertainty. 
Phenomena that determines the course of our lives. 
Yesterday my life was headed in one direction. 
Today it is headed in another...

These forces that often remake time and space, 
that can shape and alter who we imagine ourselves to be,
 begin long before we are born and continue after we perish.

And all becomes clear. 

I wish I could make you see this brightness. 
Don't worry. 
All is well! All is perfectly damnably well.

 I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions.
All boundaries are conventions waiting to be transcended.
One may transcend any convention if one can confess any conceivable reason.

Moments like this I can feel your heart beating as clear as my own 
and I know the separation is an illusion.

My life extends far beyond the limitations of me!


I hope these words give you the same sense of immortality I felt!

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