Why do we need to think about how we live our lives?

Written by Zaira Sofía Ariza Varela, undergraduate student: "Lessons and reflections post Covid-19" elective

The question that has been posed to me is difficult enough not to have an immediate question, in fact, I will try to do what I never do: write on the fly rambling until I know the answer. Usually when I’m asked a question or a social problem I know what to answer, I’m an intelligent person, or at least I think so. Most of the time I constantly review news, documentaries, poems and books, even if that means risking my academic life; surprisingly, this has helped me to enter classes totally lost and yet have the capacity of abstraction not to fail any subject.

When I entered college it was as if a cargo truck pushed me into a mesh full of spikes. I didn’t know anything about what I was doing with my life, I didn’t know what I wanted or what I was doing there, and to be honest my career was my last option (and what a good last option it was). I remember the first blow as if it had been a fist in the face, of those subjects that are never forgotten and that cost, the terrifying subject called Logic, where Heidegger hit me with his Nazi intelligence.

To my surprise I never needed tutorials, or at least, not to pass with a relatively decent average, and I always knew how to divide my time to do college things moderately well. That semester I failed one of the three midterms of Logic, and I remember very well how it was because that day I met Sebastian, or well, I already knew about his existence because he was a monitor of said class, but it was the first time I interacted with him. The events were more or less like this:

I felt very confident when I arrived to my midterm because according to me, I had enough knowledge to defend my position but as soon as I entered the classroom I realized that this wasn't the case. There were always three of us in each midterm: the first girl took over everything, leaving me, one of the calmest girls and little concerned about the exam, totally exposed to being massacred by the two people responsible for my grade, Sebastián the monitor and Samuel the teacher. My sentence was written.

Now I know that Sebastián has dedicated his whole life to the history of dissident subcultures and social struggles, but back then I did not know this and it was like going into the mouth of the wolf: a great mistake. That day I just wanted to get out of there: I wasn’t sad or angry, but I was rather embarrassed. My tactic of never formally studying had failed... But I did learn something that day and I would discover more about this in later semesters. That day I was curious to question myself, to ask myself how I live, how I manage my life and how cultural reactions to inequity permeate our society.

That semester I passed all the subjects even if I didn’t know very well how: I’ve always been a fish out of water. The next semester didn’t change much. I kept living my life, kicking in the ocean of the unknown, trying not to give up much of my academic life while doing what I wanted. This changed only in the third semester.

After overcoming my irrational hatred towards Sebastián for having made me fail a midterm that I deserved to fail I decided to follow him online. He is a handsome guy and besides we had various friends in common in the faculty. It was at that time he received his second death threat. The first was in November 2019 during the National Strikes, around when I marched for the first time.

He had always been a person far removed from urban disorder. I had studied at a remote school in northern Bogota where traffic and working life were never affected by the 'vandals' who disrupted social order: I was always outside, in a paper bubble. Quite the opposite of studying at the Externado.

I don’t remember very well how I ended up marching those days. I think it was because I met people in the Externadist Movement, the group of students who organize things to show their discontent in the streets without putting our life in danger. I, again, did not know very well what I was doing, I only knew that the police were breaking human rights regulations in the demonstrations and that the country was shedding the blood of ex-combatants. That was enough for me to go out and demonstrate.

When I really questioned myself explicitly was during the public denunciation of the death threat received by my ex-monitor: it was as if a shock had abruptly hit me on the head to finally realize the reality. How could a 20-year-old be threatened for being a student leader? How could Dilan Cruz have been murdered in cold blood that same year? How was it possible for the police to persecute students who decided to show their indignation to an incompetent government? There I understood it, I lived in an idyllic utopia, one in which there were no questions but only mechanical movements, the same ones that made my life in automatic mode.

When you start to have that social awareness everything changes: it’s like in the movie They Live, like putting on glasses to discover reality. This is the search for social justice, and this is how I decided to question life itself.

Friday the 13th of March was the last day I set foot in college in the third semester. I remember that day very well and also the day I stepped on those huge block stairs again, which was about eight months later when I went to my friend Ricardo’s house. That trip downtown after so long hit me with almost the same intensity that it had in the first semester of college: like a cargo truck against a barbed mesh.

The routine of university classes did not let me think much. Between the ups and downs of assignments, copies, friends and training I did not know how lucky I was to have a normal life, an average college life. That changed when I went back to 11th Street. There were many empty businesses, the same ones where I had obtained my semester readings, the backstreet bar was no longer there, the streets were deserted and the restaurants closed. Again, my questions appeared like iron burning on my skin: the pandemic had highlighted the inequality of the neoliberal system.

My family and I survived the crisis because we are part of our basic necessities, food. For me from the beginning it was terrifying to go outside (thanks to my special permission I was able to go outside from the beginning of the pandemic) and seeing the empty streets I always wondered about the informal vendors and what would become of their lives. If we did not think about them before, in times of crisis, their inattention was incomparable. At the same time, the killing, harassment and persecution of human rights leaders, farmers and indigenous people did not stop. Sebastián received his third death threat at the height of the pandemic.

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After describing my experience about how I questioned my feelings I still do not know how to solve the question posed, but maybe it is worth wondering how we are living because this is just the minimum we can do to change ourselves and change the world. This sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s what must be.

The human being is always asking himself questions, such as the origin of his existence, the creation of life, the creation of the world, everything. This is how it's always been, and being restless and with a need to find his way in the world is just natural. It’s the same with what surrounds us.

We’re used to being in our comfort zone most of the time but life always takes care of pushing us into our own sarcastic mesh to get out of there and grow and evolve. So it is with our way of life. The pandemic has only made us refine that ignorant need to want out of inexperience. Covid-19 was nothing more than our cargo truck, it was that impulse that made us see through the "Se Arrienda" signs the need to see ourselves in the mirror and ask: 'Why do I have to worry about how I live?’ For out of that question hangs our life, our future. However, ask this to the street seller who ran out of money, or the farmer who is seven meters underground with a bullet in the head. Or better yet, remember that you probably had, or have, a person infected with the virus.

If we do not ask ourselves about our present, our future will be diluted.