A few weeks ago, I was on the top floor of a famous building in the central region of São Paulo, next to the Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa, when he turned to me, pointing to the buildings that surrounded us and said: “I don’t understand you white people. on top of the other like bats. But a bat is a bat and a man is a man. Why do you dwell on being what you are not?”. He walked off to see the rest of the landscape, but my mind was stuck there at that moment until today.
If you’ve talked to me since this conversation happened, I probably told you this story because the end of that David question has been ringing in my head ever since, “why do you dwell on being what you’re not?”
I think that phrase went through me in such a strong way because I myself have been questioning myself what I am, and consequently, what we are.
Are we really beings touched by the divine to be aware of things and dominate the planet with our wisdom? Are we cogs in the eternal machine of market productivity? Or are we just a cluster of cells that coincidentally organized themselves into the shape of people with no specific purpose?
I really do not know. And I don’t think anyone really knows. But I think there are some people and beings who are closer to this answer than others, and certainly we beings from the city and capital are not those people.
One thing that has been bothering me a lot right now is the urgency of unnecessary needs.
We urgently need to produce value. We have to consume products urgently. We need to make money urgently. We need to blindly follow leaders urgently. We need to post the latest social media trend urgently. We have to do something urgently.
And in the last few weeks, every time someone tells me they have to do something urgent, Davi Kopenawa’s words echo in my head: “Why do you dwell on being what you are not?”
More and more we are very far from who we are. What do we really need? What really matters.
Why do we work a lot to give better conditions to those we love if the act of working leaves us far and tired to live with those we love?
Why do we focus on physical and material riches when what we will remember later is feelings and immaterial things?
Why do we freak out so much about the future, when the present is here now and we’re destroying it little by little?
Why do we push away who we love? Why do people dirty what feeds us? Why do we kill the system that keeps us alive?
“Why do you dwell on being what you are not?”
Meeting new people nowadays or even talking to people I already know, when I ask about them, they answer me about their positions, their jobs, their studies. Things they are, not things they are.
My biggest fear these days is not an atomic war, a new pandemic or the end of the world. But rather we get stuck in a communal story that doesn’t make sense. It’s people thinking that the meaning of life is production and destroying ourselves and the planet because of it.
But just like the meaning of the tree is to be a tree. Ours is to be people.
People don’t need to do practically anything that we think they need to. Life doesn’t need practically anything that we think is important. Life doesn’t need three-letter headings on the business card. You don’t need sleepless nights to please your boss. You don’t need to hit the target by 25% at the end of the quarter. You don’t need the beach house.
Life just needs us to be alive.
And maybe that’s the problem. The thing is so simple. So direct. Which gets confusing. “It can’t just be that”, we think. But what I wonder is if the ant wonders if being an ant is just that and dreams of being an elephant. Or if a stone wonders if it’s just being stone and dreams of being a river. If time dreams of being sound. If light dreams of being a tree.
Perhaps yes. But today, I guess not.
These images may seem absurd, but that’s exactly what we do on a daily basis. We dream of being what we are not and having what we don’t need. This comes from the story we’ve been telling ourselves too long to accept being what we’re not, doing what we don’t need and destroying what we love.
Now is the time to change that story. To count on a more empathetic one with ourselves, where we accept that we are this here and everything is ok.
That the story we are telling ourselves today is not giving us the time and resources to ask ourselves, “Why do you dwell on being what you are not?”
