A simple walk that becomes gratitude
Every morning, I cross the street with my dog and step into the small park that lives in front of my home. At first sight, it might look like just another routine, but when I slow down, I realize it is a ritual that shapes the way I enter life each day. While he runs joyfully, nose to the ground, I take the opportunity to clean a little along the way, moving leaves or small pieces of paper, not because anyone expects it, but because it feels like a dialogue with existence itself. That simple act of giving back to the space that hosts me is my way of saying thank you, as natural as breathing. Gratitude is not always expressed in big words or gestures, sometimes it is woven into the invisible threads of daily life. Just as the sun offers warmth, light, and life without asking for recognition, we too can learn to radiate love without condition. That kind of love —pure, quiet, generous— is the one that sustains us, whether we are aware of it or not. It is a love we encounter in fleeting moments of stillness, when the noise of the world pauses and we remember that, even in our fragility, we are held.
Designed in wonder
It is almost incomprehensible to realize that you were designed exactly as you are —with your strengths, your apparent flaws, your endless potential— before you could even look in the mirror. Long before you doubted yourself, long before someone told you who you should be, there was already an intention in your being. To contemplate this is to stand before a mystery, and mysteries, unlike problems, are not meant to be solved but to be lived. One morning, sitting on the grass, I felt that truth more clearly. I was humming softly a song that had accompanied my early hours, a melody repeating like a prayer: “paradise has no time.” I looked at the trees, at the dance of the branches with the wind, and at the sunlight filtered in golden fragments through the leaves. In that instant, I felt something beyond words, a form of communication that does not use language but presence. Neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio explain that emotions and sensations precede words, that our body knows before the intellect translates. That morning, I realized how limited words are —they can only offer a pale reflection of what life reveals directly when you are simply there, breathing, observing, being.
The limits of intellect
For centuries, Western thought reduced reality to the precision of mechanical laws. It was a dazzling triumph of the intellect, but also a narrowing of perception, for in our pride we believed that the mystery of the human being could be reduced to an equation without soul. Yet reality itself resisted such simplicity. With the birth of quantum physics, the walls of certainty trembled: particles capable of existing in more than one place at once, phenomena that shift simply because someone is observing them, distances bridged by invisible entanglements. Physicists like Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg confronted a reality that laughed at our old certainties, a reality that reminded us that not everything can be measured or reduced. In the same way, when neuroscience explores the depths of the brain, it discovers that consciousness is not only electrical activity —there is an emergent quality, a subjective flame, that no equation can fully capture. And so, in both science and life, the closer we look, the more the ground seems to open into mystery. Intellect illuminates, but humility allows us to receive what intellect cannot grasp.
Beyond the machine
The human being is not a machine, no matter how much our models have tried to convince us otherwise. Neuroscience today recognizes the extraordinary complexity of our brain: one hundred billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others, generating patterns so intricate that even the most advanced computers pale in comparison. Yet, even with that staggering architecture, what emerges is not only cognition, but consciousness —the ability to feel, to dream, to create poetry, to long for meaning. Physicist Erwin Schrödinger once wrote that consciousness is never experienced in the plural, only in the singular. That unique quality is what makes us part of the great equation of life. Music, poetry, mathematics, art —all of them are attempts to reach something greater than ourselves, to touch the infinite through different doors. But we can only do so when we recognize our place within the whole. We are not separate observers trying to extract truth by force; we are participants, co-creators, listeners in a vast symphony. The truth cannot be torn from nature as a conquest —it is received, like a gift, when the mind bows and the heart remembers.
The act of remembering
In the end, the journey is about remembering. Remembering who we were before someone told us who we had to be. Remembering the wings we were given, not to remain folded, but to learn to fly through the skies of possibility. Remembering that wonder did not vanish with childhood, that dreams are not fantasies but the language of the soul. Sometimes it is enough to look with new eyes, to dare to lean into the threshold of the unknown, and to accept that life has always been whispering truths that we had simply forgotten. Philosophy has long reminded us of this: Plato spoke of knowledge as remembrance, and modern psychology, from Jung to contemporary thinkers, insists that within us there are answers we only need to uncover. The secrets of life were never hidden in distant places; they were always beside us, waiting for us to open the senses not just to survive, but to marvel. That is the quiet equation of life: to be, to receive, to give back. And in doing so, to rediscover the love that holds everything together.