Category — Quotes

Today was our last day of work. More mine than Felipe’s, since he’s got a “bonus”: had to change a little the plans and will be working on Monday again.

We left home earlier than we normally do, took the 8:00 bus and not the 8:45 one as we usually do. I couldn’t recognize anyone in the bus, odd. I didn’t take my breakfast to work to have it later, because I was late, however, we had breakfast at a nice cafè, calmly and I got to work before 9:00.

At 2:30 PM my boss said “Have you finished everything? You can go anytime you want”. The feeling of leaving early on my last day was weird, saying goodbye to everyone and simply leaving in the middle of the afternoon, something I’ve never done before… No… I preferred to stay until the end of the day, give the last tips to Amii, the girl that will be replacing me, send the last emails that someone may need, delete my personal files and passwords from my computer, let everybody go, one by one, passing by my desk and giving me a hug - enjoy your trip / see you again in 6 months.
I was the last one to leave, already without my keys, as I didn’t look back I had the feeling that today is another Friday just like any other, it was 5:30 in the afternoon and the shops were still open, the streets and bars full of people… Because tomorrow is Saturday.

But from now on everyday will be Saturday. Perhaps with some Sundays in between, when the shops do not open and people are not running. Week days will no longer exist until March next year.

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“The world is so empty if one thinks only of mountains, rivers and cities; but to know someone here and there who thinks and feels with us, and though distant, is close to us in spirit - this makes the earth for us an inhabited garden.”
[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the Earth all one’s lifetime.”
[Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad]

Another day I was navigating among my favorite texts that I’ve got saved on my computer and I found this Amyr Klink’s quote which made me reflect (again!):

“A man must travel. By his own, not through stories, pictures, books or TV. He’s got to travel by himself, with his eyes and feet, to understand what is his. To one day plant his own trees and value them. Knowing the cold to enjoy the heat. And the opposite. Feel the distance and absence of shelter to be well under his own roof. A man must travel to places that he does not know to break this arrogance that makes us see the world as we imagine it, and not simply as it is or can be. That makes us teachers and doctors of what we have not seen, when we should be students, and simply go see ”
Amyr Klink

Among the thousand things that read and reread this brings me, I can say today that there is nothing better than being a student, that I hope I can always have the opportunity to “go see” and that perhaps the next months might be the most intensive course of my whole life.