What a difference a name makes...

When I was born my parents wanted to give me a name which means Angel’s Rose. By then no foreign name was admitted in Portugal and this one was much too strange for law to allow me to have it. Today I realize how much that simple fact may have defined a lot of things in my life.
Had my parents’ first choice been accepted and I wouldn’t have been sitting in the front row of my class for years and I wouldn’t have been the first to do things nobody wanted to do – even when no one knew what those things were -, and maybe that fact has defined me as the crazy person that follows whatever road, whatever the conditions are, and whatever the company (or lack of it) to get where I feel like I need to.
Had my name been Rose, and maybe I wouldn’t have to insist with a bunch of people to use my nickname – because apparently there’s no way a person named Ana may be called nothing but her first name – and nobody would have mocked me on the kind of words that go well with Regina... Maybe I would have been more self confident in doing things after seeing others doing them and realizing there was nothing to fear, or maybe I would have just never turned so bold as to follow ways without needing anyone to guide me through them... maybe I wouldn’t have a problem in letting people guide me through whatever neither...
But... thinking straight: would that really change something?
A long time ago I’ve decided not to regret anything, either what I do or what I don’t. Decisions have always been too difficult for me to make to spend any more time focusing on what could have been after I made them. Unfortunately, doing so is not always that easy... but lately I’ve been thinking that “what if...” is one of the worst ways to start a sentence if the following verb is conjugated in a past tense... If it’s something of you’re making, it will make you feel guilty; if it’s someone else’s responsibility it will only feed bad feelings about that person. If it’s something that didn’t work out as you wanted it to, it will make you regret not having done things otherwise; if it did... then it’s not even worth thinking about it, is it? I mean, is it, ever?
Why do we need to name everything? What does a star need a name for? Will a star shine any brighter if we call it star other than darkness? Would black be any less black if we called it white? And who tells me that what I call white is the same color anyone else sees when referring to the name someone, somewhere, decided to call it? And who decides over the name of things, anyway?
The same way, why the hell does society need to label people? Because it makes it easier to make us forget that we are unique and we don’t have to follow the ridiculous paths that make it easier to shut us up when we have some inconvenient truth to say? So why in the world would anyone adhere to that? And in the end, why do we need words?
Words only make it more difficult for people to understand each other... Each word, each concept, has a totally different meaning for each person, so every time we use a word to communicate with someone else, besides language and cultural differences of course, we’re referring to a totally different experience of the concept in that person’s mind... Because what I call love means something so utterly different from what you’ve experienced as being love, and what you think of as just and true and loyal is possibly opposite to what I consider it to be... and so we keep on being misunderstood, thinking everyone is getting the same message we’re trying to convey.
I’ve never liked labels – they’re as harmful as they’re useless – and words... Words... Words are never enough and are much too often too much...
Words are worthless and useless if they don’t come together with gestures, as studying history is useless and worthless if it doesn’t bring any change... So why do we keep on focusing in the past if we have no intention of learning something from it? And once we’ve learnt, why is it so difficult to do things differently or to let go of things that are not useful anymore?
Maybe that’s what words do: preserve a past meaning of something that shouldn’t be meaningful because however named the thing as such, surely didn’t see it the same way you do now...

We never learn anything if we don’t experience it and experience is something that is never conjugated in the past, for when it’s past it’s not experience anymore, it becomes a memory.
Since life is a permanent change and the same river is never crossable twice, we should be focusing on teaching our children not on how to get stuck but on how to let go...
That’s all we need to do to be truly free from concepts and misunderstandings, from labels and misadjusted names.
We just need to...
...let go.
"Surrender to what is. Let go of what was. Have faith in what will be."
(Sonia Ricotti)