Dare to ask “WHY” to live your best life.
I always walk the same path to go to my internship. It takes me 40 minutes to get there and I love it because I always find very useful ways to enjoy this moment, either by reflecting on something on my way there, listening to podcasts and interviews online, or simply by paying attention to my surroundings. On this path, I see the same buildings, the same people, and the same trees. They are always there keeping me company and being really interesting features of the journey I’m about to begin. Everything was fine and enjoyable until I learned about plants.
I learned that there are native plants around Portugal that have impressive benefits for our health and, on top of that, I learned to harvest some of these plants, which means that I could actually be using them on my meals. That was an incredible lesson for me because now I could start paying attention to the gardens around where I live and I could collect my own food in the little beds around where I live in the middle of a big city like Lisbon! That learning changed the way I interacted and noticed the path I walk everyday to go to the internship.
Ever since that lesson, I don’t walk around just appreciating those same trees and plants I used to walk by. Now, I know what they are and how important they are for us and for the biodiversity in Portugal. Without these plants, the whole ecosystem surrounding this country would completely different, as well as the animals, the land and, ultimately the culture around this city. Just by changing “small” things like wild and native plants, it would change the whole structure of how life shows itself to be. The interrelatedness of our system is real, vivid, and living, but not explicit. For us to understand that we are part of something bigger takes time and a change in perspective, which is not so easy to integrate with our current understanding of things. It takes immersive contact with different ways of living for us to question our own, it takes attentive care to be able to see beyond the visible and it takes an open heart to be able to feel it in our daily lives. In our rushed and busy society, we’re not prepared for this learning.
Close to where I live, there is this nice little bed of plants that, after I learned about the native ones, I realized I could have that for lunch and dinner, I could collect them and save some money in the supermarket, I could eat them and get more variety of food in my body. In summary, I could be a lot more connected with my surroundings and, ultimately, to myself. All that, just by collecting and appreciating a species of the plant around me.
Unfortunately this bed was on the side of this busy road, and it’s not recommended to have wild plants that are close to streets like that. I got a bit frustrated facing this information because that could be a great nutritious source of food and, if more people knew about it, they could benefit from it as well. I accepted this fact after a while and continued passing by them, always smiling and being thankful for their existence.
But then ignorance came and I couldn’t believe my eyes.
One day, I woke up and was going on the same path as I normally go. I concentrated on trying to untangle the earphones that were in my pocket and as I was about to put my podcast on, I heard this loud and horrible noise close to me and I was wondering where was that coming from. The moment I turned around the corner, I saw three men with a weed cutter machine. That death noise made my heart pump and, as I was approaching them, I saw what was in front of me: they were cutting the whole bed of those native plants. My jaw dropped and my eyes opened like never before. Those men were cutting and stepping on those plants as if they were walking inside their own house.
I couldn’t stop looking and I was still a bit confused whether that was real or just a horrible dream I was having. I said to myself “I need to talk to them”. As I was approaching the man, I didn’t know exactly what to say because how could I explain all these feelings and understandings of systems, interconnectedness, nature, and our own survival in just 5 seconds by asking him a question? I didn’t know but I wanted to at least ask something. Once I got close to him, I asked “why are you cutting this bed of plants?” and he said, “Because I was told to do so”.
That answer was bitter and disgusting. But at the same time, it was adequate for that moment. Because of that answer, I realized that’s what we do with our lives. We are told to do so many things without any explanations when we are young that, at some point, we stop questioning things around us. We learn that making questions is annoying, is disruptive, and is unnecessary. “Why are you going to question that? That is what it is. Just accept it”. I know we all heard this at some point in our lives. We leave our own sense of exploration and creativity behind because we don’t dare to question, we don’t dare to be annoying. But we should.
If we still want to live on this planet with dignity and humanity, we should be asking a lot more questions than what we are doing right now. If you don’t ask why, someone will give an answer for you and if you don’t agree with that answer given, you better not even be in this system. The way things work around us is always the same and the ones that question are, usually, the crazy ones.
And from now on I have this oath to myself: to be the crazy one, the annoying, the disruptive. It’s definitely not easy when you grew up being told not to question things but I don’t want to be living in the shadows of this dying social system that is not prepared for questions and diversity. So, from now on, I will question a lot more than I do because that’s where I can create the best life for myself. From now on, If I could choose one word to speak until I die, that word will be “WHY”.
