Knowledge is supported by statements that can become clichés. They say that women can handle several things at the same time, while men think about them one at a time. Let everyone speak for themselves. Housewives, for example, give a faithful and long testimony of what it means to struggle in multiple household tasks, with one eye on the concrete life of each child and the other on the endless little things of everyday life, little things that are indispensable, of course, in order for the family to function like finely tuned machine.

Those of us who were in management positions know that several problems gather on the table at the same time and that every document that is signed must be reviewed (let alone other people’s mistakes) and corrected, that meetings should be attended with a prepared agenda and that speeches should be written authentically. the one who pronounces them. Phones throw us out of concentration. Peers or subordinates require immediate responses. The circuit of the personal never shuts down and is responsible for emitting light and requests from the depths of the subconscious. Everything was hidden under the label “normal”, although there was also room for an exceptional column.

However, the high dimensions of knowledge point us to one thing, to the nuclear unity of being, to the indivisibility of the psyche which, even when it loves, cannot fulfill its desire to merge into another. Religion tells us about the immortal soul, whose salvation depends solely on personal responsibility and will. Everyone who is used to meditation recognizes his inner voice and even duplicates it in a dialogue with himself. One, always one (or one, if the determiner has a gender).

It is difficult to maintain individuality within the confluence magma of our past.

Then mention Ñamérica – a concept coined by Martín Caparrós to identify us as a culture – and remember the different aspects of our identity. Native indigenous cultures with their wide racial overflow, the Spanish intrusion that ensured the white element and its cultural separation in terms of language, political structure and religion, the African presence that also colored us in external and subjective forms, the various European migrations towards our generous and hospitable land . The triumph of the different, the mixture, the manifold becomes notorious just by looking at our faces and hearing us argue.

It seems, then, that the great lesson of history is to live with different, changing faces of diversity. Leave the narrow lessons of classicism and inveterate aestheticism, built on European models, which still believes in the prototypes of beauty and harmony of the classics and the Renaissance. Latin America is a territory of multiplicity, a diversity that is embodied in features that lose their original features until they build another face, a malleable behavior that learns and changes, worn by fashion and that is also rooted in tastes, skins and smells that come from ancient times and distinguish certain ways of living and being. That the stamp of poverty and bad governments impregnates a tinge of sadness and oppression, which drives people outwards, is also involved. It is difficult to maintain individuality within the confluence magma of our past. (OR)