"Humankindness"
Autor: Mateus Labrunie | Publicado: 2014-02-09T15:37:00-08:00

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Here I
begin my travel journal. I don’t know how many of them there will be, I haven’t
planned myself to do it, I just enjoy writing when something emotions me or
bothers me. However, as the emotional moments and the bothering ones are almost
constant when you’re in a trip, it is probable that you’ll find me here a few
times more. I’ve chosen English as the language for this matter because I have
been making a lot of international friends and I would like them to be able to
read it and share their opinions with me.



Well, as
some of you may know, I’m currently living in Bordeaux, France – yes, the wine
place, yes, it’s very good… - and will be here for the next 6 months or so. I
could give you a description of the city, and how the struggle for the accommodation
was, or describe the installation process, the friends-making process and etc,
but I won’t… “I’m too old, I’m too tired, and I’m too fucking blind”, as Al
Pacino would say and I quote, except for the blindness…and the
oldness...Anyway, it’s not really what I want to talk about. What I really want
to share with you is a specific moment, one of those moments that you
unconsciously stop time and say to yourself: “Whoa…that’s a really nice moment…
What a privilege, how did I end up here again?”



Anyway,
before we get to the moment, I must explain how I got there. I play volleyball,
as some of you may know, so as soon as I got here I started going to practices
and eventually got called to the University team. Today, we had a match against
Toulouse, in which we won by 3 sets 0, and in which I thank bigger forces for
being able to do an ace at the final point of the decisive set.



After the
match, and after we had all taken showers and got dressed (no problem with
nudity, these Europeans, by the way), I was looking for someone that would
leave in the same direction as me, and so I went back into the court. At this
time I figured, “Game’s over, we beat the bastards, now let’s go home”. For my
surprise, when I got back into the court, our coach was in the bleachers, preparing
a snack. Not for the winners, but for all the players and team members that had
participated in the match.



I don’t
know why, but that moment really touched me, I mean, it was a snack together,
duh, what’s so new about it? But it was not that…It was the spirit of the thing
that got to me. We played together, we were adversaries, we “fought” in a
symbolic way, but now: let’s share bread. They do not know that, but in that
moment I really admired them. It’s a simple and basic idea that we seem to
forget, that of looking into the other and not seeing a rival, not seeing an
enemy, but seeing a normal human being, that is most of the times hungry, and
loves brownies and madeleines.



Afterall,
we are not the ever-competing self-interested individuals as the economic
theory and job market makes us want to feel and think, we are humans: “We want
to live by each other’s happiness, not by each other’s misery”, as Chaplin
would say.



We thrive
and we brag about the benefits of inflated rivalry, and we forget that competition
is only worthwhile to a certain point. That moment showed me what we’re losing
when we do so: basically, the opportunity to make friends and to share
happiness.



After the
snack, we all went to our respective homes, somehow connected by the ancient laws of food-sharing:
we were all of the same tribe.&nbsp;



I now understand that the only way to go one
step further as humankind is to go one step further in human kindness.