Throw my ashes in the bend of the river...
I published the text below (in Brazilian Portuguese) a few months ago on social media (X, Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky)
I once heard someone say that "not finishing something shows a lack of character".
I thought to myself: "I must not have any character..."
As a teenager, I left things behind - chores, homework, food on the plate, certain companies (and that's a good thing) - and it didn't bother me. I even dropped out of university in my final year (and that was a good thing for my present - ok, my future was hampered, but what can you do? You can't have everything in life, and even less at the same time).
Anyway, my abandonments were piled up (some, for the good of humanity, were taken back) over the decades: houses, affairs, girlfriends, partners, friends, religion, jobs, games, restaurants, environments, bars...
I've just never abandoned my loves and passions.
I really am a person without character.
And not very happy with the short text above, I "committed" a short story:
Not everything needs an end
It was a muggy August afternoon, one of those afternoons when the soul seems to want to escape from the body in search of an unlikely refreshment. I was sitting in the old café on the corner, watching people hurrying to and fro, when I spotted a familiar figure in the distance. Thin, six feet tall, slightly bent, with a countenance that was always somewhere between dreamy and disillusioned, here came Jake, as absorbed as ever. His steps, at once careless and precise, showed that he was unconcerned with the world around him, a characteristic that always made him stand out. He was the kind of man who seemed born for abandonment.
Jake never made a point of finishing anything. I remember one time when, while everyone in the class was scrambling to hand in their final History paper, he nonchalantly declared that he saw no point in finishing it. "What's the point?" he said, with a gentle smile on his face. "If the world is made up of unfinished things? Well, look around, everything that's perfect is doomed to die." The class, perplexed, didn't know whether to laugh or cry at the serenity with which he left his work halfway through and walked away. And so he went on with his life.
Among his friends, the consensus was that Jake had no character. "How can someone who abandons everything be trusted?" they said. I, however, always believed that there was something deeper in his way of being. Yes, he left things behind - colleges, jobs, girlfriends - but there was always a bigger reason behind what seemed to be sloppiness. He himself once told me, while we were playing cornhole in Louis' bar: "You know, every single thing I gave up was because I knew there was nothing left for me there. Continuing would just be a waste of time, an illusion of completeness."
It was a philosophy of life, in the style of Ernest Hemingway's great characters, who lived on the margins, between social failure and a kind of moral greatness invisible to the ordinary eye. Jake seemed to have understood early on that life was not a novel with a clear beginning, middle and end, but a series of overlapping stories, full of detours and gaps. That's how he drew his trajectory: always unfinished, always beginning again.
He said that abandonment was a form of love for freedom. While others clung to careers, marriages and friendships that had already played their part, he went on lightly. When he left college in his final year, many called him crazy. "A waste!" the teachers exclaimed. "He'll never amount to anything!" some predicted. But Jake didn't care. He preferred to devote himself to a small vinyl store that he opened with a childhood friend and which, to everyone's surprise, succeeded. That is, of course, until the day he decided he had explored everything the business could offer and, without warning, simply left.
At this point, you could say that Jake was a wandering soul, incapable of committing to anything beyond the immediate present. But therein lies the mistake. He never abandoned his loves and passions, as he himself liked to point out. Music, for example, always accompanied him, even when the world around him changed direction. He would spend whole afternoons playing the guitar, lost in melodies that seemed to come from distant times. He was never silent, even when it seemed that the rest of his life was falling apart.
And that's how, over time, I began to realize that perhaps the problem was more in us than in him. While society saw him as a misfit, incapable of finishing anything, Jake was actually a kind of visionary in reverse. He understood that the value of a life was not in the endings, but in the beginnings and the middles. Every abandonment, every break-up, was a new chance to start again, to explore another facet of the world. For him, life was like an assembly game, and the fun was in taking it apart with each new attempt.
But unlike Jake, there was another character in the story - someone who, in his own way, seemed to be the perfect opposite. He was Walter, one of those men who believed in the virtue of commitment above all else. He finished everything he started, whether it was a job, a project or a friendship. He always prided himself on being the last to leave, the one who persisted to the end, even if the end wasn't worth it. "Not finishing something is a lack of character," he said, like someone who preaches an unquestionable dogma.
Walter's life, unlike Jake's, was linear and predictable. He married his first girlfriend, worked for the same company for 40 years, and retired with all the medals of honor that society can offer. But while the world saw him as an example of righteousness, I couldn't help but notice the emptiness in his eyes, the lack of sparkle. What Jake had of inconstancy, Walter had of monotony. Where one saw freedom, the other saw duty. Where one found passion, the other found obligation.
Deep down, perhaps that's what Walter lacked: a taste for the unfinished, the uncertain. Something that Jake, with all his wandering soul, always had plenty of.
And so, between abandonment and completeness, between uncertainty and duty, life took its course. For some, it was a linear journey with no major surprises. For others, a series of unfinished stories, where the real value was in each new beginning or in the steps, both careless and precise, of a long and tortuous walk through the streets of the neighborhood.
Sérgio Vieira
@sergiovds at X, Bluesky, Threads, Mastodon, Medium, Instagram
mailto: Projeto Impressões Digitais
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Brazilian Portuguese version in Medium