NIGHTS AMONG THE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS

NIGHT 2- A Soul Without Midsoles

Having visitors is part of the dream.

For any expat it means a lot to introduce their new adventure to those who were part of the former, even for a few days. It is not about showing off, or a lozenge and "in situ" sale of the new experience, it’s about integration.

Ii is the temporal mix of the new and premiered with the loved and very often worn over your shoulders. It is making the familiar so close as your wishes for what it is yet to come. Dip a piece of the puzzle that rests on yesterday’s table and see how well it fits in the one we have put on the new.

Some of these old pieces are masterpieces. And they are masterpieces for so much essences they did give to the full picture; because around them grow branches without which the composition would be nothing, and they are masterpieces because they shed a fondness whose color has never disappeared.

Pablo, my classmate, my boyhood friend, is one of those pieces. And Pablo came to see us at Dubai. He came with his family, with his puzzle in the backpack, in which there are pieces that bear my face, my story and my safe code.

The truth is that the real creation of a human being is his life, and that principle of freedom is the foundation that, in real life, makes us all equal. It is in this reality where equality ends. With greater or lesser breadth of choices, we’re all commanders and artists of what we want to be. We are not thrown into a life to just live it, but to make it, from the day we arrive to the day we are gone.

Therefore it is extremely curious that two people so extraordinarily different in the method are producing outcomes so amazingly alike. The friendship of Paul and Oscar , was always contradictory, skeptical in its views and necessarily a shouting one between two mental roads that ran so much diverge, but yet so close.

Everyone who knew us well would wonder how could two such different people have that degree of complicity; how a couple of guys that did not think the same about anything at all could be such good friends. How could Pablo’s quietness and meticulousness match with Oscar febrile hyperactivity; the rabid reactivity with the cartesian analysis, the insolent vehemence of the short guy, with the seducing self-security of the tall.

 Complementarity, the topic lover would say, but  he would be wrong, because people are just pieces of other persons puzzle, and the puzzle is never another person. The puzzle is nobody, but life itself. And here is the answer: in the creation, in life. Therein lays the reason that two such diverse beings could  be so close.

I have already understood, and it has been here, in the place where some nights among the thousand and one nights are giving me the clarity to find out many things that may only be discovered from the perspective of distance and time.

The work, life, that's the key.

Because the colors of some paintings do not make them so different to each other when what is being painted is so similar. And Pablo can find  himself in my canvas, as you can recognize me in his.

The two of us always knew what the world we wanted to devour looked like, and we keep biting furiously. None have fallen out of love with rebelliousness, each in a different manner, and continue praying every night, bowing that it would reappear each morning in the mirror.

Neither Pablo nor I ever refused a sweet, nor never were pastries our vital ambition, nor tempted to become bakers. Rather we were always intrigued about why some few could gorge on sugar, and increase their wickedness levels, while many others could only watch from the shop display; or how came the latter, that often went hungry, could also become evil.

 
Now we both know that in the end, even though our creations ran through distant roads they  had one same direction, in which transit was, as nonnegotiable station, delivering to this huge theater other works, other lives, that have started to develop.

You know it. You know when you see Pablo in their children. And he knows it when he sees me in mine. When you look at five kids who hardly know each other and check incredulous how well they get along.

And it’s then when a song you’ve heard before reaches your ears, music with lyrics that talk about people who looked so different, but actually were the same. And you close your eyes, and would like to think that in the concert that life forces us all to give, this quintet of guys will play melodies of kindness, consistency and principles; but mostly will always recognize their own and dedicate to them a tune.

It is true, eyes are not so shinny as thirty years ago, but their ability to understand without words  has not changed, as the communicating power of either glances or small signs… saying that we are the same. Somewhere else and in a different time, but still the same.

And you feel happy when it becomes clear that this factory of oxide that is time, those thirty years that have changed a lot of things, have not spoiled some people. Because they have understood time as the engine that powers their work and make it go forward. They have learnt to decorate their life, jump over its frustrations, accept mistakes, dodge its temptations, take its blows, celebrate milestones and even laugh at its jokes, to remain starring it, and still be able to brag, as the song says, of  having "a soul without midsoles".


* For a detailed tour diary, Pablo’s blog. Each post represents a day of his stay in Dubai with his family. Our musical totem were always Simon & Garfunkel, and each of the posts are titled a with a song fragment from them, relevant to what we did every day.

The title of this one mine, "The Soul Without MidSoles" comes from another song by Joan Manuel Serrat, another of our idols, entitled "Saying Friend" which I recommend listening.

Pablo’s blog, here.