English Version | Every possible life

How many lives are we allowed to have? Or this isn't a matter of rights? We all know how it starts, but no one knows when, or how, it ends. Some take destiny into their own hands and bend it to their will. But everything in life has the right moment, especially when it comes to new beginnings.

In the beginning, we’re born. “To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born”, Charles Dickens wrote right on the first paragraph of the classic David Copperfield. And it is just like that, as it says in Dickens’ book, that everything starts – for a matter of comfort, let’s agree that, by principle, everything starts at the moment we’re born. There. Except there’s a little question that sometimes unsettles us: how many times do we really get to start over? It’s established that everything starts when we’re born, we get it. But how many lives do we live? How many lives does a man have? Let’s start with the joy of simple answers, those that are right at the surface and are easy to understand. We’ll use the very well-known tune as a motto and form of inspiration: “Solo se vive una vez”, as Azucar Moreno used to sing (do they still?), summing up the sentiment of a general crowd. A man is not a cat, they don’t have seven lives, or nine, or whatever number of lives people say cats have. A man, as far as it is calculated, only lives once, as the two Spanish sisters sang. It is, in a way, easier and much more comfortable to believe that this is what we are, from now until the end and that the best thing to do is follow Robin Williams’ advice, “Oh captain, my captain”, in Dead Poets Society: carpe diem. To seize the day, be the moment, enjoy the simple fact that we’re here, keep it simple, who knows if on the next moment it will all end. We shall then be this and only this, squeezing the most out of what we have, taking from life all that it can give us. The secret is not to complicate, to live only once, yes, but to do it by living as much and as best as possible. Et voilà, it’s solved. The problem is that there is a problem: human beings don’t deal so well with the simplicity of things as soon as they start thinking. 

Metaphysical interlude 

As humans, if we were to accept the possibility of only living once this easily, we would have never developed so many and so sophisticated imaginary artifacts that allow us to deal with the notion of our own ending. Take a look at religion. Monotheist or polytheist, occidental or oriental, every grand religious devotion includes a reward: this, life, doesn’t end here. In the beginning, the question was the beginning. At this point, it’s not only the beginning that matters, but also the end – or its absence. From the Judaic – Christian eternal life to the Muslim paradise after death, going through the reincarnation possibilities for Hindus and Buddhists, there are many ways to seduce the mere mortal with suggestions that this is not how it starts – it’s how it restarts and not how it ends. These ideas also come up in other cultures, whether as beliefs or philosophies. The Greeks had already included in their mythology the Kingdom of Hades, the land of the dead, the world below where those who were no longer alive would live. The platonic philosophy included the thesis of reminiscence as a result of the immortality of the soul. In the contemporary age, having at our disposal a vast amount of theories and visions regarding the relation between space, time and matter, one could speculate and accept the possibility of, before eternity – not in the religious or spiritual sense, but in the time flow with no beginning and no end –, accept that it is possible that every circumstance will one day repeat themselves (in many zillions of trillions of years, for example, or even after that), which would allow us to, in a way, exist again. The French writer Michel Houellebecq dared to suggest something similar in his principles, the magnificent The Possibility of an Island, where new beings inherit the history of their antecessors, reproducing them and, simultaneously, adding to them. It’s complex. 

The lives of others

Allow us to be more mundane and less philosophical. We repeat the question: how many lives does one have? Many are those that throughout history – whether we mean real, fictional or hybrid histories – restart their life, with no need to be reborn. Dom Sebastião, for example, the legendary and greatly awaited Portuguese king, supposedly killed in Alcácer-Quibir in 1578, might have resurged, alive and in good health (with an even better memory), in Venice, 20 years later. This theory is sustained by more than one historian and depositions dated of the time abundantly corroborate it, including the one given by the Vatican authorities, for example. Perhaps, Dom Sebastião did not die – he just hit reset: left the battlefield, denied the crown, deserted the nation, and went on with his life. But that was a long time ago, which makes the mission of confirming the facts and separating them from the myths a little difficult. Much more recently, and with a lot more reliable information, it became known that Arthur Rimbaud, the poet, dumped Verlaine, his lover, and poetry, to join the Dutch Colonial Army. He was a soldier in Indonesia and fell in love with Java, before regretting all of it and conforming to a life of conventional comfort. A man can be so much more than a man, he can be various consecutive versions of himself, multiplying and diving the time he has left through various lives he intends or has the courage to live. Let’s take a look, for instance, at Corto Maltese, by Hugo Pratt, who took a knife and drew the line of destiny itself on the palm of his hand. Then, he set sail and lived journey after journey, adventure after adventure, an immensity of lives. Consequently, we also have fiction – but in such a real-life way that it could be true – Giovanni Drogo, in the brilliant (and suffocating) Desert of Tartars, by Dino Buzzati. Drogo did not realize on time that he could live multiple lives and thus allowed that all but one – the one he had – slowly escaped him, second after second, until the last moment, that in which it didn’t even make sense to regret. He only lived once. 

Our lives

As life is drained by time, as so happened to Buzzati’s character, who contemplated a static desert waiting for a purpose, how many times do we stop to think about what we’re doing with it and with what we have? How many times do we try to understand if we are what we would like to be, if we do what we’ve dreamed we would do, if we’re satisfied? Attention: satisfied, not satiated – never satiated. Do we have the company of those we love, is it true that if we pursue the things we want, then we achieve and keep what makes us happy? How often, as life grows and, simultaneously, diminishes, do we avoid thinking about all of it, only to save ourselves from reaching painful conclusions? Conclusions that would force us to put things into perspective and rethink our life, possibly even make us want to reorganize it. And this reorganization, changing our life’s course, set it towards a new destination, aligning its route, can be a painful exercise. Worse: it can be even more painful if it is no longer possible to change everything. Getting straight to the point and dropping all illusions: changing our life at 25 is not the same as doing it at 45. At 25, one barely has a past, everything is future, all is an expectation, and the damages, the mistakes, things we’ve left behind, were nothing but learning curves, not more than that. However, at 45, the past we carry with us is substantial, it matters and weighs. And the future is much more of a tunnel through which we have a narrow glimpse than a sea of wonderful opportunities waiting to be explored. Now, if this is the case at 45, what can we say of 55? And 60? How many times and how far into our lives do we get to take Corto’s knife, Sebastião’s sword, or Rimbaud’s riffle, and redefine destiny, restart our life, throw the dice, and play with the world, risk the universe and our existence, try again, but differently? 

Changing your life, beginning again, restart. Sometimes, even apparently simple changes can turn into great challenges. For example, having a child. Those who have children will know there is a clear frontier that separates the before and after of paternity or maternity. What once was no longer is. After all, we’re talking about bringing a new human being into the world – new life, something special that now begins – and that needs care and attention. At the very least, a kid will mean a full remodeling of the universe as we once knew it, starting with the bedroom that used to be spare. There are even simpler challenges though. A friend was telling me, a few days ago, that her parents, whose huge house was very hard to upkeep and is becoming emptier and emptier thanks to the progressive and inexorable flea of their children, that they consider moving away. They’re looking for an apartment, a smaller place, that isn’t as demanding and better suited for their needs. All this is normal, but there’s an extra ingredient in the mix: they’re starting to feel their own pressure to get it done. Because they watch time go by and begin to picture themselves without the necessary energy that a move would demand. Meaning, they’re aware that if they see it through now, or in the near future, later they won’t have the motivation or ability that such a change requires. It might all sound really simple, but if we put ourselves in their shoes, it makes sense. There’s a moment when we must move forward, knowing that if we let the right time go by, we might never do it. New beginnings have their own right timing, a specific moment. Missing it is to take a huge risk – of letting life pass us by. These changes are even more demanding when they demand a reconfiguration. 

For example, when someone decides to leave the city and move to the countryside, a tendency that day after day, wins over more people and has great examples to offer. However, no one moves to the countryside at a young age. Youth wants action, it feeds on restlessness and drinks from novelty. To leave the city and go to the country implies, out of principle, a fresh start, from routines to pleasures, possibly to the way of thinking and contemplating. A decision of the sort requires life experience, knowing what you want or don’t want, and those tools can only be acquired with our own passage of time – which leads us to the problem: until when is it safe to undergo such a change? Even further: what if we regret it? Will we still be able to go back? If we miss the right moment, will there be a second chance? New beginnings are all very nice when we find ourselves at midnight on the 31st of December, a time when, excited for the novelty of the calendar, we find ourselves willing to do things we’ve never done before, including changing our life to make it what we’ve always wanted, when we’ve never had the courage to do it before. Because changing, restarting, implies loss. We can’t get everything we want, the mere mortal can’t, at least. 

Another friend of mine has had the same job for 30 years. He enjoys what he does. If he didn’t, there’s no way he would have lasted that long, years on end doing the same things every day, complying with the routines and preconceptions that are not always enjoyable. No job is 100% enjoyable and it could never be so, not at all times. If that job existed, I myself would pay to do it – and, in that precise moment, it would stop being a job and become a hobby. That friend of mine was worn out. The company that employs him changed and, as any other company, rightfully so, it searches to cut down costs. It’s obvious that an employee with 30 years of service won’t work for cheap. He knows that his time on that job is coming to an end. But when you’re older than 55 years old, and spent half your life dedicating yourself to one job, how do you change, to restart, to try everything again? And once again, the dilemma: if not now, when? What are the options? How much can he risk, and when? Whenever we talk, I find myself experiencing a feeling of impotence. On one hand, I have no pieces of advice for him, I can’t tell him what to do, suggest this or that, “go that way”, “don’t do that, do this”. I have no idea. On the other hand, I also can’t ease his mind – on the contrary, I end up inevitably thinking about myself and of the day I will also find that place of discomfort and imminent disequilibrium, when the opportunity to take a chance, to leave it all behind, to give up things because I have hope or trust in what’s coming, no longer exist. There is a day when the decisions we take will be definitive and irreversible: this is it, from henceforth everything will be a consequence of this moment in time. 

There's more – I know a lot of people. Go figure, a couple in a relationship of over 17 years, many of those spent with some pain and many struggles. From it they have kids, several, one of them is still little – not that little, not like a baby; little as in he hasn’t hit puberty yet. It’s been ten years that we’ve discussed how this combination of people is tiring, of how this relationship brings him unhappiness, of how much he dreams of other things and pictures other paths for himself, drawing other outlines in his fantasies, other lives, other habits – and other people. The last few times we discussed it I got the impression they were at a breaking point. This time was it. We talked with an open mind. After all, what are friends for? I cut to the chase: whatever he decided, he had to do it sooner rather than later. If they were going to stay together, then do it. If they’re going their separate ways, then part now. But keep in mind that they must decide swiftly because if they linger on, it will be irreversible. Today, they can still dream of new beginnings, they can still take other risks, they can hope for different days, possibly better ones. But not long from now, the life they have left will be the one they opted for at that given time – or that they didn’t because they let the right time go by. In that case, I have no doubt that his spirit and passion will tell him to break up, to end it, to leave and start again. However, just as so happens with New Year’s Eve resolutions, that fire that makes us want things also weakens and, finally, fades away whenever it is put under the light of logical thinking, mainly confronted by the fundamental question: if I light you up, if I let you burn, what am I burning, what am I losing, what will I be giving up? It’s not just about materialism, it’s about putting loss in the equation, a global loss – physical, emotional, material, financial. What to do when all of it adds to the pressure, until time passes by: to break everything up and start again, accepting all the risks that decision encompasses; or to hold on, taking the chance of reaching the time when we’ll never be able to change again because it will be too late? All these can be both real and fictional. It is not relevant to identify them as this or that, because I believe we all know of have been in contact with people that face similar circumstances and equivalent dilemmas. What is the age limit to change everything and start over? What would be the ideal circumstance under which to do it? How many lives can we live and until when can we try to have a new one? Perhaps I should wrap up this article, turn off my computer, pack up my stuff, grab the shovel and move to the countryside. It’s time I go have a kid.

Originally translated from the New Beginnings issue, published September 2021.Full credits and stories on the print issue.