If I were exactly in your shoes, would I be you?

If I were EXACTLY in your shoes, I probably would do the same you do.

I wrote this text after reading a message from a friend. Maybe it has nothing to do with his subject, but somehow he triggered this.

What I mean, it might be difficult to explain, but I would like to try by proposing an exercise of imagination.

First, try to think about a person you don’t like.

Now imagine that you are that person that bothers you. Imagine that you were born in her place, with the exact same genetics, that you grew up in the same place, the same relatives, that you were raised by the same people, that you had EXACTLY the same experiences, down to the smallest detail.

You are no longer you. Nothing YOU lived in your life is with you now. You are exactly the person you are imagining. Can you feel it? Can you understand?

It’s quite difficult because it’s impossible to know all the details of a person’s life. We absorb every experience we live to get to where we are now and, for the most part, this is unconscious.

The smallest details lead to other details that, unpredictably, for infinite possibilities, lead us to be who we are.

For example, if my friend hadn’t tagged me in his message, maybe I wouldn’t have written this text and you wouldn’t be reading this right now.

Does it change anything in our lives? Yep! It changes everything. We may not have this perception, but every action has a reaction, everything is connected. Each new piece of information that enters our mind confronts millions of other pieces of information and alters our way of thinking.

Our mind interprets our accumulated senses throughout our life and creates its own universe.

Everything exists in a unique way inside our minds.

For you to understand EXACTLY what I’m trying to explain, you would need to be born again in my place, with the same genetics, have had exactly the same experiences, same education, same teachers, have played the same songs, read the same books, skipping the same classes, using the same drugs, having hooked up with the same people, anyway…

Do you realize how difficult it is to put yourself in exactly the same place as a person?

I’m writing just to share a thought. The consequences of my act are unpredictable. These words will possibly be around until after my death and perhaps it can make sense to someone who has not yet been born.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I’m more and more sure that if I were, exactly in someone’s shoes, I would do the exact same thing. I’d probably would be that person.

But if I don’t agree with the person, it doesn’t mean I’m going to accept everything they do. Not agreeing is exactly what I do being in my shoes and, whatever my attitude, it is exactly what I do being myself.

When my mom died, I had post-traumatic stress disorder that somehow made me kind of give it all up.

I lost my ground. I left my Masters and went to New Zealand with the “excuse” of learning English, but I think I was actually running away or looking for something to fill the void, something I didn’t even know what it was, I just did what I thought I should have done.

I went to the other side of the world to discover that it’s no use running away from myself and that I carry all my past inside me. That’s the way I went. I could have figured it out another way, but it wouldn’t be me. Paulo Coelho had a similar experience when he traveled to Santiago, “The Alchemist” was the result of that journey.

Maybe we are always looking for something, until we understand that everything we need has always been with us all along.

They are paths. And I learned from one of my uncles that they always take you somewhere.

And this place is yours alone, but we are connected to it.

We are all like water molecules in a river. Some molecules end up in the air, others in the dew of plants, others in animals, sewers or the sea. Each one is fulfilling its role where it is.

Water flow is a physical factor and can be calculated exactly when we neglect a number of factors considered negligible. For example, if I want to calculate the speed of water in a river, I can do the calculation based on an “ideal model” that considers the river as a pipe.

It turns out that the river is not a pipe, the river has rocks, fish, plants, small details and imperfections that make the difference and do not allow for exact calculation. We can calculate a close value, but it will never be exactly the same, unless it is possible to consider exactly all the smallest details.

Everything has a very important place in the final result.

I believe that each one in his own time will discover himself, and will blossom like plants. Each plant has its rhythm. Some bloom all year, some bloom only once, some don’t bloom at all, but all are important within the ecosystem.

There is a universal set and every particle in the universe is a subset of it.