We need to let go of certainty and open up to serendipity

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The beginning of Emicida's song called “Cananéia, Iguape and Ilha Comprida” has not left my mind when writing this text. At the beginning of the song, we can hear Emicida's daughter playing a rattle and then his own intervention: “no, rattles have to be played willingly, do you? Only no giggle, right? No giggles, because it's rap here, bro, where the people are angry, got it? The people are bad! Bad! Bad! To work this rapper job you have to be mean! Uh, did you? No giggles, OK?”. His daughter laughs with laughter at her father's rigid and authoritative verbiage, making anyone melt with all that laughter. And the Emicida continues: “Does Brown go through this? Or Djonga? Or Rael? I don't know, man, here the guys are bad!”.

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This music entry is a work of art in itself; Emicida, with all the sensitivity she has, begins to rebuild the stigma created over rap and the rapper himself. All that rigid, hard, “evil” carcass that cannot laugh or “beech tree” crumbles in front of a child's laughter.

I wonder how much of this isn't a call, a trend we all have to immerse ourselves in. Not just the rapper, but the professional stigma and to live in the society we created for ourselves. How common is the demand for rigidity, firmness and composure and how much harm does that do us? How much does this affirmative figure, always with the right answers that we are imbued to live, affect the way we relate? Is there no alternative to all this rigidity?

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I think there is. And the hot tip that the Emicida brings is exactly this: the alternative is to laugh at what all this bravery means.

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BREAKING THE RIGIDITY ​

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We live at a time when we realize that the modus operandi of being rigid, dominant and aggressive no longer fits into our social fabric. This is explicit at the moment that we do not have answers to the demands of the human species: we did not know how to consolidate a response to misogyny, structural racism, economic crises and income distribution. Every time we try to deliver the right answers to these demands, dressed in our rigid armor, we simply fail.  

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It's not that these answers don't exist; but for us to reach them, we need the child's laughter to break down this stigma and access this answer in other ways.

Note that I don't say “laugh” in the sense of making fun of these issues, on the contrary: laughter is an artifice to break all this rigidity that simply doesn't fit anymore; we need to deconstruct it to go back to dialoguing, sewing different ideas on other levels.

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When the child laughs at all this unnecessary rigidity, he breaks with all the foundations that structure this stigma of always having an answer; while we continue in our theater that everyone must be firm and not show their vulnerabilities, children are teaching us to live the world in a way more free from this archetypal force that plagues us so much.

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While we all always want to be with the right answers, children open up to the serendipity of life. And this is where I really start my argument: if we don't learn to live with the serendipity that children propose to us, we will continue in a boring world that cannot respond to our social and individual demands.

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SERENDIPITY AS RESPONSE ​

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Children are able to live in a reality from which they live only that moment with those conditions designed; they don't necessarily aim for more or less - they play with what's available. Watch a child looking at the sky; while we adults keep wanting to measure the temperature exactly, they can look at dinosaurs, cities, symbols all relating there at the same time.

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Unlike us who all want to bring critical thinking, kids are open to different connections all the time; they are open at random. Vinicius de Moraes (recently quoted by the Pope) already said: “Life is the art of encounter, although there is so much disagreement for life”.

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Being a child is being able to have the chance of generating encounters at the same time that we generate disagreements; it is the art of being able to connect ends that would never be connected by the field of reason. Being a child is an ode to the possibility of ignorance bringing you glory.

On second thought, the real capacity for innovation is not just in the technique, but in the capacity to let serendipity happen; it is not necessarily to innovate because we connect the right dots, but rather because we let any dots connect until there is something that gives meaning.

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Children have a lot to teach us: we adults lose the ability to let serendipity happen because of the need to control everything possible. Well then, we've come to a point where too much control creates depression and anxiety; and now?

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HOW TO ALLOW FORTUITOUS

SURPRISE US

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Maybe it's time to slow down; perhaps it is time to let the serendipity of play show us the best path we can follow.  

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And look, I don't just say this in my head, but this force that I evoke here is so important that it is even worshiped in several traditions as deities: from Ibeji to Krishna and Nezha, they are deities that teach us never to forget that being a child is always having the ability to let things flow like it's the first time, no matter how “experienced” or how much you've seen it happen.

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Being a child is the ability to always look at things with a fresh aspect, seeking to see something different. After all, adults are always full of opinions and certainties (and even always get in the way with their certainties).  

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In fact, being a child in this world is an important key to escape from all the pranks that exist in our paths as challenges. Also because, if we have a challenge, it means that our repertoire is not able to provide an answer; so we have to look for answers with other connections.  

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A suggestion I learned from listening to this Emicida song: whenever you have to have a rigid, tough and “bad” posture, as Emicida plays with his daughter, I suggest you not incorporate this archetype, but go to his daughter's side. : laugh at this figure, let it fall apart in the tone of your laughter; maybe that way, there is room for you to breathe and be able to think of some other solution that you had never thought of.

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After all, challenges in our journey are not lacking. What is really missing are broader perspectives, permissive to diversity and capable of a less critical and more constructive construction.

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We have some tips  to give you the next Pico .