Being born every day hurts.

 

Kroyer, Mulheres e pescadores em Hornbaek,1875

The title is in homage to Pedro Paixão, as a counterpoint and continuity to his "Living every day tires".

We are born when we tear our mother's womb and this is only the first beating, but the most painful. Therefore, we are allowed to forget this pain. I've heard many stories about childbirth and pain. It's about deliveries with pain and without pain of the parturient. One of them tells of the child's pain. What is curious about the pain of childbirth is that only the pain of the parturient is expected and presumed and never of the born. And to save mothers the pain, the epidural was even invented. And to reduce the risks of the birth, the cesarean section. The story I bring to tell you begins with the breaking of the waves of foam against the rocks in the sea. The storm. The shaking of the nets and buoys. But it is about life, pain and refinement that leads to the liberation achieved, when we are allowed to become children again. And return home. At home, women cower at the sea, by their husbands fishing, by those who disappear and swallowed by the immense ocean, by the triangles of the Bermuda shorts in every house of fishermen's widows. Curiously, the same ones who, before they were widowed, wove the nets of hope and at those times, tried with detail to reduce the size of the holes, so that big fish could save their dinner table for a whole month. They wove together, prayed together as they sewed and mended the fishing nets again. They told together about the absence of their husbands and when dawn came, they left with flashlights and harpoons and spears and other props, they would come to the beach, help push the boats, scold fears and demand promises back! And they asked God to return them intact and healthy, full of fish in the small boats that, courageously, made themselves to the immense sea. Many wept together and sensed together widowhood clouding their future. Many! And they sought to know, when storms approached, whether it was their vessel that was compromised, how many were saved, how many the sea swallowed. They were omens and hopes. Deluges and fright, and some vanished like the fog that tore them from the light, and others stood up, screaming that no weather would eat them. In the bodies of many women, children were already guessed who would never know their father's face, orphans of the sea! These brave ladies were going to demand from the waves, from Poseidon, the return of the dead so that at least they could mourn him. And the sea swallowed them up and as many times as it did not return them, it dragged them far, so far that even with hope and need of a body to mourn, these lantern eyes of the sea women couldn't reach. The pain was unbearable, not being able to say goodbye to the missing gaze, to the father of the uncle, the grandfather and the brother! And if the sea was glorious and abundant, it was, at the same time, emasculating and diabolical, a thief of souls sung by the hymns of humanity, throughout the world, throughout history. Pain refines the soul. The soul appeases in the face of faits accompli. Say. I say that when a fisherman's wife or any other parturient woman is lucky enough to have a beacon in the storm of the breaking of the waters, no matter how much pain there is, in the contractions between the waves that come every seven crescents and the dilations of the belly of the sea, the pain is always violent. To be born is to die in another way. The pain is so violent, the dimension is dystopian. From light, we descend into darkness in a flash. And we have to learn to breathe in water in the womb and breathe outside the belly without water. They are forms of violence that make life something magnificent and impossible to explain, except when translated by the explosion of love, the reunion of an egg and a sperm.  This is the party, where we have the right to fireworks, music and dance, hopes and drawings of constructions between the hiccups of life that do not allow us to guess and the laughter that allows us to dream utopias and ideals. I hope the sea is calm, I hope I get to the beach, I hope I know how to breathe and not panic, i hope that life is not, in itself, a postponed disease, I hope that I learn to fall and get up. You are born in a moment and in that single moment when you realize that there is no more light and everything begins again, you will still know if you are a living miracle or a stillborn, if you are a wave that breaks or a rock that catches, if you are a prosperous fisherman or a body adrift.

I have always known myself to be passionate about life and its mysteries. I've always been fascinated by the sea as a whole. In the calm that forces me to go inside, in the storm that makes me recognize the outside. To go inside is to know myself, to come outside is to recognize myself in others. I was born from a womb that was the same as the others. Violently, I tore my way through the waves of amniotic fluid at the end of some moons, and before the moons, I was enveloped in light,  the waves of my mother's sea threw me against the walls of the rock of her womb so many times, and other times that, even though I had dreamed, desired, hurt me and expelled me. Violence begins when we are born and we are allowed to forget everything. Or we'd go crazy. Just like the constant spiritual battles between our demons and our angels. If we could see these spiritual battles, between our demons and our angels. If we could see these spiritual battles, in the same way that we look at the sea or a pregnant woman, or a coffee drunk on the side of the road or a fire or a brief farewell without a definitive goodbye, we would die again. Emotionally, we are not prepared for violence. And repression hides, simulates, conceals, pushes, make-believes, but do not be deceived. Pain is always a form of violence, a lesson to be learned, a fire to be purified, the tares to come out of the wheat. Life is magnificent when we are aware that happiness, as well as hope, are the palliatives to learn that we did not come to a kindergarten. The sung sea of poets, refreshing of bathers, is the same that buries by submersion the bodies that sing them, especially men who live dangerously in the abyss, between transitory states of consciousness. The parturient, between contractions and dilations, tears, screams and anxiety, sees the ripe fruit with eyes and arms and recognizes herself in it, she loves it already loving it inside the womb, and all her life shows her that this child who cried at birth and who is already a man who makes himself to the sea, like his father, will always be her child. She does not yet know that that child is not hers, that that being did not come to fulfill a life that she chooses and desires for him, but her own life. And you see him grow up and he can either want the sea or reject the sea entirely. To reject wanting children, to refuse to bring orphans, to reject those pains, for bringing within him other pains that he chose to live before bursting his womb and vanishing from pain in an Apgar of any kind, in a head circumference with a unique and non-transferable register. In another head circumference that is not the same as his own, in another ocean than what others want for him. And they grow up and when they obey their hearts, they fulfill themselves, growing old and learning and gaining baggage so that one day, when they already have more wisdom than strength or reflexes, they will have the courage to take the book of "must and have" and do the math, the whims, the dreams and the frustrations that they have carried in themselves and When they are no longer afraid of the dark or loneliness, when they already know themselves inside and already recognize themselves in those on the outside, they accept to put down the notebook of duties and slowly start saying goodbye to life, to others, to things, to ignition and that is when they discover that after all, they have always been alone, they have always learned their lessons, they have always crossed oceans and made choices alone. Just like when they swam away, breathless, purple, with shrivelled skins and successive and constant learning. There, at that point, they become introspective and contemplative, tolerant and understanding, with themselves and with others. And they become children again, because the worst was when they arrived! Leaving is already expected and they begin, at that wise time, to live in the here and now, to forget what was and what will be, to leave the clock and the calendar, the expectations of others and the obituary of the newspapers, and at that time when more those who knew them are gone than the strangers, who feel like playing again, not the explosions of love,  but to the here and now.  And they begin to properly appreciate life, its contingencies and absolutisms, its choices and slowness, the lapping of the sea and their hearts, and when this happens, that the hustle and bustle and the crossword puzzles, the friends and the food, the slavery and the work, the illusion and the fantasies of a child no longer make them smile, Then those big babies are ready to go. That if they have really learned their lessons and with their lives added up more than subtracted in terms of love, the miracle happens and the painless body drops the anima by the sea, every seven waves, one of them will come to pick them up, and it no longer matters if the sea that carries them is as rough or calm as a lake,  because they already know how to swim in and out of water and fly in and out of the soul. The child leaves the elderly body, with its expiration date expired and frees himself and the pain only remains for those who still have them in their memory, until they are just a memory, a photograph on a shelf, then not even that, as Telomar Floreêncio said, and very well. And the sea that is only the beginning of the storm, the start of a journey, becomes the reflection of the sky that is unlimited for those who know how to fly. And only children and birds of the air fly. The others dream. The former because they remember that time without clothes, without a body, the latter because they were born blessed to do so in freedom, and the adults because they live in the illusion of mortality and are held back in the past by the pain of repetition or suffer from anxiety for fear of new pain. The sea is not afraid. Rocks are not afraid. Fear kills more than any war or disease. Life is a repeated mystery and the other side is freedom from captivity.  Life is not a kindergarten or a playground. No, life isn't all pain, but it's not just rides. The men of the sea know this. And so do their companions.  Babies feel it, more than anything and everyone!