I recently learned a few lessons I wish I could have learned earlier in my life. However, I am grateful these lessons came to me now, so I decided to share them with you hoping you won’t have to wait to later in life, as it was in my case, to learn and implement these lessons.
First, I recently…
We are all watching the drama in Thailand where an international team of experts works to recue 12 boys and a coach from deep inside a cave. We wish, of course, for all of them to be rescued alive, healthy, and promptly, so they can return to their families and nobody else will get hurt or worst dur…
It has been said you can’t force people to see what they don’t want to see or to hear wat they don’t want to hear. In other words, a closed will also means closed minds and closed hearts. This truth is so old that two millennia ago a wandering preacher urged those with ears to hear.
Closer …
These are the days when we discuss messages printed in the back of jackets to decide how much we care or don’t care about certain issues. However, the debate about caring or not caring is as old as humankind, specially if we are talking about other people, as it is shown in the old example of a brot…
In the final chapter of his 1932 book about 18th century philosophers, American historian Carl Becker argues (and I agree with him) that the more you expand your consciousness of your own past (both personal and historical), the more you also expand your own future.
Specifically, according to Bec…
I was recently invited to a gathering of community leaders representing different organizations and groups wanting to have a project in common. During the second hour of the meeting and with no warning, one of the participants stood up and said, “We are still slaves!”, surprising all the participant…
I recently had the privilege of making a presentation about the emerging future to a community group. The presentation was an opportunity to listen again to a long list of excuses we (I include myself in the “we”) use to hide from the new future and to remain hidden inside a past which exists only i…
I recently went to a well-known supermarket chain to but a certain fruit. Since that was the only thing I bought, I decided not to go to the human cashier (there was a long line) and I went to the automatic payment station. I put the fruit on the scale to weight it and, at that very moment, I was in…
Just a few days ago (May 13, 2018), an international group of more than 30 scientists from different universities published a paper together analyzing the cause of the “Cambrian explosion” an “explosion” of life that happened on earth around 500 million years ago. They conclude the “explosion” proba…
Francisco Miraval
I recently had the good fortune of meeting an educator, now retired, who shared with me anecdotes about his long career. I asked him what “education” meant for him and he immediately said that education is the process of detecting the words that create obstacles for a student an…
Paraphrasing Ortega y Gasset, we could say “I am I and my consequences,” that is, those consequences, frequently unknown and unrecognized, of living in a limited reality created by our own limiting thoughts. Even worse, we assume that’s the whole reality and then we want everything and everybody to …
In 1928, Carl Jung, quoting Heraclitus, wrote that we, humans, are running into the opposite direction we should or could go. My small mind prevents me to understand the ideas of those two great thinkers, but that doesn’t mean I can feel the truth in what they are saying. I can’t express it, but I f…
Years ago, my uncle told me, “I told you a million times not to exaggerate.” It was, of course, a joke based in the obvious self-contradiction of the thought expressed in that statement. But it is not a joke the increasing number of people using similar expressions and fully unaware of the self-cont…
There should be no doubts that we live at a time when our prehistorical brain can hardly handle the multiple and unexpected challenges we now face and that we were not designed to face. We were designed to light a fire inside a cave, not to save a techno-globalized, overpopulated planet from self-de…
I have a limited understanding of what it means to live in a post-truth era, that is, at a time when we only pay attention to our own ideas and never analyze them. And I also have some understanding of what it means to live in a post-democracy world (many examples around us.) But, what does it mean …
A few days ago, a good friend of mine invited me to have lunch with him because he wanted to share information about the important progress he was making in a community-oriented project he began decades ago. I immediately accepted the invitation, but I didn’t like the restaurant he selected, because…
I recently enrolled in an online course because I liked the key question of the course: If you are so intelligent, why aren’t you happy? I decided to jump right away into the first video, but there was a problem: no audio. The professor was clearly speaking, but I couldn’t hear a word. I was frustra…
I recently met by chance with a local community leader recognized for his many years of working supposedly “for the benefit” of the local community. I said “supposedly” because, according to this person, we (our community) deserves to live in poverty and ignorance. Hence, the question of the title: …
Francisco Miraval
Some time ago, when I was given the opportunity of teaching philosophy, I asked my students to tell me what the did the day before the class, and then two days before, and we kept going until we found a day where nobody in the room remembered what we did on that day. We have rea…
I was recently invited to talk to a group of community leaders and I decided to talk about one of the topics that I have been studying for many years: the emerging future. The presentation and the dialogue went well, even when of the participants said, “We shouldn’t be talking about that”.
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