Human Perspectives – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

Photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash

This week I read something striking about Emperor Marcus Aurelius. In his Meditations he wrote about imagining ourselves outside the earth, looking down from infinity, from space, to see how insignificant, or rather how tiny, we are, along with our fears, our worries and everything troubling us about the past or the future. Along those lines I reflected a little on my own life, since this week I turned thirty-nine, and I often try to picture how and where I’ll be when I double that age, at seventy-eight. Is it worth thinking about that, starting now? What for?

Another meaningful date is coming up. On December 3 our family remembers both the birth and the passing (17 days later) of our second son, Juan Diego. Life and death may seem like opposite corners, yet they sit so close together that we barely notice. Thinking about either one doesn’t terrify us so much as worrying is simply easier than taking the trouble to understand how to see them. It’s harder, for example, to build a habit that reminds us how tiny we are next to the vastness of the universe, or one that reminds us how fleeting our time on earth will be. It’s much easier to believe we’ll live forever.

One way to see things in perspective is to be aware of the effort, the energy, that thinking takes. Preparing for an event that might seem devastating (like death, knowing for a fact that sooner or later it will come and no one knows how or when) requires us to examine our system of values and beliefs. In other words, we have to prepare to accept our thoughts, direct them objectively and act accordingly. All of that takes discipline and dedication, because one belief might be that such an event should "never" happen, not to me. So questioning the belief that "this won’t happen to me" will surely feel like a leap into the void.

Perspective is the human capacity to imagine we’re somewhere else, that we can achieve something just by thinking it, that we can go further than we believe, to imagine we’ve won the race. We’re born with that creativity and can keep cultivating it all our lives. The same creativity we often use to build something powerful for others we can also turn in our own favor in the most adverse situations, especially events that touch us directly. One way is to build the habit of looking more carefully at every event that enters our lives. How we see it, and where we observe it from, will shape how we choose to feel about it and how fully we’re willing to accept it as it is.

Coming back to my thirty-nine years and to my son Juan Diego, I think about life’s opposites. On one hand I celebrate my life, and on the other I reflect on his passing. What both share is that neither one (my life or my son’s) belongs to me, ever did or ever will. That perspective has given me the calm and serenity to accept the greatest challenges, and an absolute trust in the Supreme Creator, to whom EVERYTHING truly belongs and in whom all things work together for good.

Warm regards,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. This week’s VELA (what I was Watching, Listening to, Reading and Learning):

• Watching: Supersapiens. I find this fitness gadget powerful, and it’s surely changing the world of high-performance sports.
• Listening to: The discontinuation of the LIBOR rate. A link shared by my colleague Christian B. Thank you, Chris. It’s worth a listen.
• Reading: Your Strategy Needs a Strategy. A very good book recommended by my brother and friend Arturo V. Thanks for your time this week, my friend, it was great to see you. The author also wrote an article that has been very useful for sorting out, as he puts it, the dozens of frameworks out there. It’s worth a look too.
• Learning: Stoic Week. Stoic Week is held in October, yet I keep learning from it, especially the 2021 edition. All the powerful resources online are well worth a look.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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