It was another Friday. It was another night of eating in the cafeteria. It was just another conversation with a friend. It was just that.
The ordinary side of this casual evening faded when my friend began to explain her new philosophy on life: to start saying “yes” instead of “no” to life's surprises.
I, who religiously follow my untouchable routine, was moved by this mentality. Discreetly, I asked her to explain more about this philosophical game.
She then begins to narrate her mother's story on the day of her master's thesis presentation.
The thesis of my friend's mother's argument was about the value of art education, especially the cultural and musical movement Maracatú — the mixture of Afro-Brazilian religious rituals.
During her presentation, she mentioned to the evaluators that she had traveled to France to capture the different ways of exploring this art in order to draw a comparative study between the European style and the Brazilian one (her nationality).
As she tells about her trip, one of the evaluators demonstrates how useless and European sycophant it was. They took this intentional trip as an offense. Why go to Europe, since she is a Brazilian doing a thesis in Brazil?
It was in this uncomfortable and embarrassing environment that Thaís Nogueira Gil verbalized a sentence that still gives me goosebumps: “Science asks how. Philosophy asks why. Art asks why not?”
After narrating this story (at this point, my mouth was already open), my friend concluded her philosophy: why not accept what life offers as a game without pranks?
After that conversation on what seemed to be just another Friday, I can't stop thinking about that artistic question: why not?
Why not walk a different route than the conventional one? Why not live a story without order?
Asking this question guarantees us more opportunities to be a collector of memories, a collector of moments that can be eternalized.
Yes, it is challenging not to follow the script you've written so carefully. But the point is that there is no danger in saying yes instead of no.
No one will get hurt in this game. You will only come out more human and bolder than you were before.