Saints and Sinners

“Every man is worth more than his mistakes”. I read this quote and thought on writing about the ones who make mistakes, but not with that eye which praises the attempt of discovering or doing it right. I also do not intend to analyze crimes or other terrible deeds.

I want to talk about the other side of mistakes, about those people with no qualification or designation for the function, who put themselves  in the place of judges, criticize and decide what is morally correct or not. They take into consideration their own truths, what they have learned or convenience at the moment to condemn the alleged error on the other. They find themselves owners of the truth, saints, pure, honest, but they do not always do what they say nor recognize their own mistakes.

Imagine a woman who, in the beginning of the XX Century, dared to get divorced, doing what many others secretly wished for. Some fearless women had even secretly planned their deaths, or even the death of their husbands, as a solution to their unhappy marriages. Why was this divorced woman segregated form society as if she had any contagious disease? What was her crime? Who judged and condemned this woman? I dare to say her executioners were her neighbors, relatives and friends.

Beginning, middle and end

                                                     

When I started school I used to think writing was easy. All you had to do was start the essay with capital letter and finish with a full stop, adding the ideas in the middle. Later I learned for getting good grades on my essays they had to have a beginning, middle and an end. I do not know how, but this concept that things need to have a beginning and a well defined ending have followed the lives of many people.

“When I was 14 a boy asked me to go steady. It was a summer night and after dinner, while I was shooting the breeze with some friends, Dudu called me to the side and asked me. Later, when I went back home, at sleeping time, I had changed my “status”. There was no Facebook to post and announce the world, but from a moment to the other my life had changed, as if I had officially taken office and started, in that day and time, a new relationship. There was a clear change between before and after the proposal.

Falling in love with someone is a slow process. Intimacy and admiration grow with time and day after day the couple starts seeing each other as friends, lovers, accomplices. Clothing  and CDs begin to mix up. The couple has an urge to tell things to each other urgently and do not want to sleep alone anymore. Becoming a boyfriend or girlfriend should also be like this, with no milestones, formal proposals or watershed rituals. To find yourself so involved to the point you both feel your lives are intertwined and a loving partnership was made.