When everything falls apart

I remember it vividly. My body recalls that moment when everything I knew shattered in an instant.

It was December 2001, my first time in Europe, in Spain. A comment about the situation in my home country, Argentina, triggered a wave of unease. Then a disturbing news story flashed across a newspaper (back then, we had no smartphones or social media). Finally, my sister’s call came through:

“Don’t come back. Everything has exploded here. This country has no future. They’re killing your college friends in the square. Stay there. Please don’t return.”

My country, once perceived as a vast, distant land connected to me by an invincible thread, suddenly imploded, collapsing into a single point before vanishing entirely. Patapuf. “Do not come back. This country is over.” Patapam.

The thread was severed. I found myself alone with my boyfriend, my backpack, and everything I had learned up to that day.

My flight home was canceled. No one could withdraw their money from the bank. In just a few hours, I transformed from a happy, intellectual middle-class 22-year-old on vacation from a country respected for its culture and resources into an illegal immigrant from a poor nation—without a home, money, rights, or the possibility of returning.

Yet my body also holds another memory from that time. One night, in a smoky little kitchen in Madrid, filled with sadness, desperation, and fear for our families, we drank to forget in the home of a friend. Our Spanish friend lit a joint and began playing the didgeridoo. My boyfriend picked up the guitar, and I played the flute. We played late into the night, lost in a trance. Suddenly, my friend paused and said,
“Guys, how I envy you! – Tíos, ¡cómo los envidio!”

After our stunned silence (how could he envy someone with nothing?), his words fell like drops of rain:
“Tomorrow I’ll wake up at 7 AM to open my tobacco shop. I’ll have lunch at the restaurant on the corner, work until 10 PM, come home to smoke some joints, and do it all again the next day. You, on the other hand, have all the doors open. You can reinvent yourselves tomorrow, start from scratch. When all doors close, they actually open to the other side!”

We were frozen in awe. An effervescent sensation washed over me, like a snake or golden bubbles of champagne. The next day, in a poetic act I’ll never forget, my boyfriend asked me,
“What is the most beautiful city in the world?”
“Paris,” I replied.
“Tomorrow we’re going there, my love. Nothing ends here; everything begins now,” he declared with the epic tone of a dreamer (and I hope he still is). With about 50 euros in our pockets, we landed in Paris the next day.
(Yes, the eagle-eye view of poetry can lift you from any crisis.)

From that day on, countless experiences unfolded. I’ve lived ten lives in one, traveled half the world, and dared to confront many of my fears. Wonder. A fascinating adventure. Wonder.

Before the crisis, I had planned to be a philosophy teacher or a classical pianist, sitting for seven hours a day in front of a keyboard or a book in Buenos Aires. I could never have envisioned the exciting, crazy, powerful, magical experiences that followed. I would never have imagined how many sides of myself I could continually unfold.

For years, I lived in Italy, always with the fear of deportation lurking around every corner. Years later, just blocks away from where an Italian woman once shouted, “This illegal South American crap should go back to their country,” I signed books for hours in the main library of Milan. Only I knew how significant and symbolic that was for me.

What lies beyond when all doors are closed?
Wonder. The New. The garden of the Unknown. Wonder.

As long as one is willing to surrender and embrace that uncertainty with grace—breathing in the wild, fresh, passionate perfume of the rose of uncertainty (no country, no home, no money, no cultural ease, no family, nothing…).

I believe the greatest gift we can give ourselves and others right now is silence. It’s comforting and enticing for the mind to devise theories about what’s happening.

It would be refreshing to accept that we don’t know. This graceful ignorance, this endless openness, prepares us to be amazed by the new experiences and revelations we are meant to encounter.

It would be so liberating to finally acknowledge that our minds alone cannot grasp what transcends them. That our science cannot fully comprehend the infinite micro and macro. That, in this state, our ears cannot yet hear the music of the planets. Perhaps we are merely a dream of a great dreamer, as Jorge Luis Borges whispered, or 10,000 possibilities and plots more.

Vulnerable, innocent, in wonder, open to anything, we become willing to see beyond the limits we impose on ourselves and others (the true wisdom of children).

It is absurd to traverse the world claiming to possess the truth while branding those who disagree as foolish.

We hear vegetarians condemning carnivores as harmful and insensitive. Capitalists mock hipsters, while hipsters take pride in being ecological and anti-capitalist, only for “true” environmentalists to deride hipsters. This cycle continues ad infinitum. The “spiritual” crowd believes they are superior to the “unconscious,” while the “true spirituals” scoff at New Age followers, and so on, ad infinitum.

In that graceful, Socratic state of informed ignorance, we are all the same. There is no room for criticism or opposition. In that state, we are compelled to recognize our commonalities rather than our differences.

When we think we possess the ultimate truth, we shrink so much that we attempt to confine the Universe within our limited perspective, personal agenda, and desires. It’s akin to gazing at a centimeter of water from our tiny boat and proclaiming it to be the ocean.

Any genuine perception of the ocean must encompass all the boats sailing upon it.

There exists another possibility.
We can leave the little boat, leap into the ocean, and float there in silence for a while.

Perhaps we can feel the vibration of the entire ocean within our bodies, sensing what moves all the boats. Wonder.

Perhaps that vibration is the very music of the planets.

Perhaps, by feeling that cosmic symphony within us, we can change ourselves—and each other—forever.
Wonder.