Is It Better to Live in Ignorance or Awareness?
HAVANA TIMES – My Systematic Theology professor used to illustrate what it means to experience certain things without being conscious of them by imagining that we could talk to a fish and ask it: What is water? Most likely, the fish wouldn’t know how to answer us, because it wouldn’t know what it was living in; it wouldn’t know what water was.
I never forget that image. But I also believe there are moments in life that make you fully aware of what you are experiencing, without confusion. Without doubt. And if before you hadn’t completely noticed it—or hadn’t noticed it at all—from that moment on, it is no longer something you can remain unaware of.
For example, once, while talking with a friend, she told me that she truly realized how poor she was (how poor we were) when she started watching episodes of Master Chef. All those ingredients, dishes, flavors… and there she was, taking notes, only to discover that she couldn’t make a single one of them. That was when she said to herself: How poor we are!
I laughed the way we do when we want to downplay something, even though we know there is nothing funny about it. I don’t know when we Cubans learned to react in such a childish way, because I see this as a widespread reaction. Like making jokes about everything. They’re hanging us, and someone comes up with a joke about the rope.
But I really had no choice but to agree with my friend. A plate of spaghetti stopped being the cheapest meal to make a long time ago. It may still be one of the easiest, but cheap it certainly isn’t.
But right now, I ask myself: What affordable product is there to cook and eat? And I don’t think there is one anywhere in Cuba. That is my impression at the moment. Or is it more than an impression? A distressing reality. Because I don’t doubt that, in some aspects of life, we can live like the fish, unaware of what surrounds us. But other things, good grief, they reach out and touch our consciousness as surely as oxygen enters our lungs, even when we don’t want them to.
Read more from the diary of Lien Estrada here on Havana Times.