Words

Words

Ducks in a row

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Today, Google Photos helped me remember where I was approximately a year ago: looking around the shop at a well-known American petrol station chain: Buc-ee´s (thanks, Tasha!)

There was a section full of posters, placards and greeting cards with really cool messages, and two in particular caught my attention. But before I show you the first one, for the Spanish-speaking folks, I have to explain an expression in English that we could include in the category of untranslatables: to have your ducks in a row, which literally translates as "tener tus patitos en fila".

Have you ever seen a mammy duck walking with her ducklings? They give you a sense of order and discipline, right? Well, that´s exactly what this phrase conveys: having everything prepared and well organised, everything under control, leaving no loose ends. At work, we use this expression quite frequently when talking about tasks or projects, or, for example, this week, as we´re getting ready to do our quarterly planning, and we want to make sure everything is in order.

OK, once that´s understood, here´s the first picture, a greeting card:

("I do not have ducks. Or a row... I have squirrels, and they´re everywhere.)

Have you ever seen, or, if you haven´t, can you imagine, a family of squirrels running and jumping in different directions? Unpredictable and chaotic; the complete opposite of a family of ducks, isn´t it? Who hasn´t experienced at least once the feeling that they´re losing control, and things are starting to get out of hand?

Which takes me to the second picture, this time it´s a lovely placard that I was very close to purchasing:

("As long as everything is exactly the way I want it, I´m totally flexible)

I think this phrase is absolutaly brilliant, and it fits me like a glove, being an Enneagram type 1 as I am. It humorously portrays the hurdle I tend to trip over much more often than I would like: having unrealistic expectations and then responding rigidly every time they´re not met (and today it happened again, sorry you got the scolding girls).

Linking this idea with the previous one, I realise that, generally, everything is fine and I can go with the flow and be content until one (or several) of the ducklings wanders off the row, and that´s when I catch a glimpse of chaos and the disaster starts... To me, this placard is a reminder that it´s easy to make progress when things are going well for us; the difficult part is not to ruin it all when things start going not so well, which, let´s be realistic, it´s going to be quite often, because life looks a lot more like the family of squirrels than the family of ducks, however hard this may be to accept.

What do you think of these two phrases? Do you identify with any of them? In which way?

Mens sana in corpore sano

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This last Saturday, like almost every Saturday, I went to my Pilates class. I´m proud because I´ve been keeping this weekly habit for six months now, since back in August when they opened a reformer studio just around the corner from my house, and I, having wanted to try the reformer machines for many years, ran out of excuses not to start going.

I know a single class a week sounds like very little, but to me, considering that I´m allergic to gyms (mainly because I get really bored in them), and that my motivation when it comes to exercising is generally low, keeping it up for this long and still being excited about it is a great achievement.

I actually love the class, among other reasons, because we exercise not only our bodies but also our minds. The movements almost always change from one week to the next, and very often they´re new, or at least, new to me. So I have no other choice but to concentrate, to get the gist of what´s happening and be able to perform unfamiliar movements with a good degree of control and precision.

And it was precisely during the class that I remembered this well-known quote: mens sana in corpore sano, which is Latin for "a healthy mind in a healthy body". This is a good reminder of how our physical health is very closely related to our mental health, and how we need to look after both, as an investment in quality of life in the short, medium and long term.

The ancient Greeks used their gymnasium to combine physical training with philosophy and other intellectual pursuits. But interestingly, this quote doesn´t come from the Greeks as I thought: according to Wikipedia, it appears for the first time in a Satire from the Roman poet Juvenal, in the times of the Roman Empire. It´s part of a longer poem, and by the way, its original meaning has nothing to do with how we interpret it nowadays: it talks about the necessity of praying in order to have a balanced spirit in a balanced body.

Whatever the case may be, nowadays we know that a balanced spirit and a balanced body (or rather, a healthy mind and a healthy body) are not things that happen overnight, or by chance,, or needless to say, by magic; instead, we have to build them up little by little, one habit at a time.

So we come back to something I´ve probably mentioned several times in this blog already: looking for ways to exercise our bodies and minds that truly align with our lifestyle and work well for us, because otherwise, we´re not going to maintain them. Some people get motivated by team sports, martial arts, or running; in my case, it´s more about going for walks and practising yoga and Pilates. I could do more, but I could also do less, and now that the weather is improving (or at least I hope so!) and there´s more of a stretch in the evenings, I know that going out to "perform photosynthesis", as my friend Juanjo would say, is going to be hugely helpful in keeping my motivation and energy levels high.

(Photo I took yesterday during a walk; it´s the same tree that appears in this other post.)

What´s your favourite way to exercise your body? And your mind?

Untranslatable expressions: to carve out time

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Today we´re adding another expression to our particular list of untranslatables. This time, the original is in English: to carve out time, and even though we have an expression with equivalent meaning in Spanish, sacar tiempo, which we could translate as "to extract time", I believe the English version paints a more vivid image, and therefore, it´s a. much more powerful metaphor .

Literally speaking, "to carve something out" involves working with a chisel and mallet, removing portions of a solid block of wood or stone, in order to give it a shape. As you can imagine, it´s a task that requires intention, attention and great skill; you need to have a very clear idea of what you intend to do, and have the knowledge on how to do it.

Now, transferring that concept to how we manage our time, we often find ourselves in a situation where our calendar is completely full, reflecting our responsibilities at work, at home, with our family, etc., plus another long list of tasks and commitments that we burden ourselves with (and we still don´t think it´s enough!). Our society nowadays values and rewards being super busy all the time, so we have normalised that way of life, together with the stress that comes along with it. "There are not enough hours in the day" is another go-to expression in English that´s a symptom of this big problem.

That´s why we find it so difficult to establish new habits to help us improve our health and wellbeing; we´re already exhausted, and we feel there´s no time for anything else. And that´s why I think this metaphor of the chisel and mallet is so relevant here: it´s not a question of simply "making time"; it´s about using that time strategically, building something with it, something that´s going to benefit us more than continuing to do everything the same way as before. And that requires intention, attention and a great skill, as well as consistency, to keep up the habit afterwards.

The reason I mention all this is because I´ve been wanting for some time to resume my old habit of reading, as I´ve kind of abandoned it in recent times. And want to resume it, among other reasons, because I believe it´s both more difficult than ever and more important than ever to keep it alive. I don´t have time right now to list all the benefits of reading (I encourage you to look them up, they´re impressive), but what I can do is share a quote from Dr. Seuss that I saw in a well-known bookstore in Dublin, and that I find very fitting:

"The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go".

What about you? What would you like to carve out time for? And what´s preventing you from doing it?

Good vibrations

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If you´ve been reading this blog for a while, you probably know that I write every article in Spanish first, and then I translate it into English, all of this from scratch, without any help from the almost omnipresent artificial intelligence (you can call me old fashioned if you want; this is one of the ways in which I keep my mind active and I exercise my creativity, two things that I consider extremely important)

The thing is, as you will have seen, that sometimes I find it hard to come up with equally precise or elegant ways to express the same idea in both languages. But today I don´t have that problem; this time, the post´s title is really easy to translate, as it´s an expression commonly used in English as well as in Spanish: good vibrations.

We say that something gives us good vibrations when we get a good impression from it; it makes us feel good, and we resonate with it in a positive way. So, why do we say it like that? Because that´s how it happens, and even if we can´t fully understand how or why from an intellectual point of view, we do experience it in our daily life, and therefore, our language reflects it.

At this point, let me apologise for my inability to provide a detailed scientific explanation on the topic of vibrations, which I would love to be able to do. I can only speak about what I have experienced myself, mostly regarding the form of vibration that´s more easily perceived by humans: sound.

In late December, I was lucky enough to participate in a yoga retreat in Madrid´s city centre, at a yoga studio called Yoga Retiro. And one of the main activities for us during those three days, together with yoga and meditation, turned out to be mantra chanting.

(Photo of the AUM symbol I got at a present in Yoga Retiro. Thanks, Swami Krishnananda and Durga Devi!)

I have to say that I loved the mantra chanting, and also that I found it a bit hard at the beginning, not being familiar with either the melodies or the lyrics (mostly in Sanskrit). But I gradually became familiar with them and started to feel more comfortable. My mind got flooded with memories from my younger years, when I used to practice another kind of meditative chants: the Franciscan prayers, El Palancar, Taizé. It was the same feeling of peace, contemplation and communion as back then.

A few days later, during the New Year's concert in Vienna, the orchestra conductor reiterated the message that music has the power to unite people. Because good music doesn´t stay only in our ears; instead, it touches us much more profoundly, it goes to the root of what all of us human beings have in common. There are even some who dare to declare that without music, there´s no life...

Because everything comes back to the same. The experts say that everything is vibration, including us. And science is now beginning to discover what the sages have been teaching us for millennia.

There are many paths to spiritual growth (not necessarily religious, though religion is there too), and each person has to find their own, but there are some fundamental elements that tend to appear repeatedly, and music and chants are present in every or almost every tradition. I have to admit that it´s one of the things I find most fulfilling, it´s always been, and that´s why I continue to investigate and learn. Sound baths, classical music and even Gregorian chants. Sound, rhythm and vibration to connect with something larger than each of us, to join the frequency of the Universe.

AUM.

"Crisitunity"

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Today, I got this daily quote as a present from Google:

Your big opportunity may be right where you are now..

Napoleon Hill

And it reminded me of a post I wrote on Facebook years ago, back when I used to write on Facebook instead of a blog (big mistake: now I no longer have access to my own posts, except when Facebook decides to show me a random "memory" and I take a screenshot, like in this case).

(Photo of a bunch of multicolour lanterns in San Francisco´s Chinatown)

I don´t know exactly when I wrote it; I reckon it was around 2009. The title I gave it was "Interesting times", a heading that I think is also very appropriate for the times we´re living in now, so here you go:

... But I don´t like being this way, I don´t like living as a pessimist, so I prefer searching through popular wisdom to try and find a different way of looking at things. And a phrase came into my mind, something about the Chinese using the same word for crisis and opportunity... Thanks to Saint Google, I found the graphical representation for those two words:

Simplified Chinese:
危机 (Crisis)
机会 (Opportunity)

Traditional Chinese:
危機 (Crisis)
機會 (Opportunity)

The key here is that the last ideogram in crisis is the first one in opportunity, so they´re not exactly the same, it´s more that one can develop into the other: in each crisis, we can find an opportunity.

The way I see it, the word crisis is passive: a crisis is something that comes upon you, and that you cannot control. But the word opportunity is a call to action, a call to react to what is happening, to do something about it. 

So, as always, the decision is ours: we can choose to see these "interesting times" as a worldwide crisis in which we´re simply the victims, or we can choose to see them as an opportunity, a wake-up call, the push that we need to rethink our approach to life and start making conscious and responsible decisions, learn from our mistakes and adapt to the new times.

What are your thoughts on this? What examples do you have, from your own life, where a crisis turned into a big opportunity? I have a few, so I´m sure you have them too.

By the way, the made-up word in the title, "crisitunity", was apparently invented by Homer Simpson, in an episode where Lisa told him about the Chinese using the same word for both things... And even though now we know it´s not exactly like that, this is still a really interesting idea, and a good example of how our language often determines our way of thinking.

Adamstown, our home

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Out of the twenty years I´ve been living here in Ireland, seventeen I´ve spent living in the same neighbourhood: Adamstown, in West County Dublin.

Adamstown is a really interesting place, quite different from the typical Irish housing estates. It was first projected in the late nineties as a brand new town, following an urban planning model that was similar to those from other European countries. The building of this "strategic development zone" started in 2005, and it was all going fine until the 2008 crisis came along, causing an economic standstill that left the town half built.

Luckily, by then, Adamstown already had its own train station, a creche, two primary schools and planning approval for a secondary school. We thought it was the ideal place for us to start growing roots as a family, so we moved into a rented duplex apartment just beside the creche, with little Irene as a toddler and Alicia a few months from being born.

As years went by, our neighbourhood continued to grow very slowly, alternating phases of moderate building with phases of almost no building at all. But far from becoming "a ghost town" (as the press labelled it sometimes), Adamstown got consolidated as a new community, modern and, above all, very diverse, staying active despite the circumstances. At that time, given the lack of public spaces where people could meet (the community centre would not open its doors until 2018), the primary schools became the main meeting point, making their spaces available for a variety of activities. And as many families had moved from either other countries or other regions of Ireland, having the opportunity to meet and support each other was a massive help as we settled and found our place.

It was during this time, ten years ago, when a beautiful project was born to give a voice to our community: the book called Adamstown my home, a compilation of stories of 27 women and their families, representing the diversity of culture and nationality that´s so intertwined in this neighbourhood; a symbol of a new Ireland.

Because what really makes Adamstown interesting is not its buildings, but its people. It´s a multicultural and intercultural community, with families coming from practically every corner of the world... Just to put this into context: in our primary school, there are kids from about 45 different nationalities, and the vast majority of them, if not all, live in our neighbourhood. And our secondary school is even more diverse, with 52 nationalities. The variety of cultures, ideas and customs our children are growing up with is truly invaluable.

Back to the present, we´re currently going through times of unprecedented building activity, with lots of growth happening in our area; I believe the job will actually be finished this time (and we may even become a whole new town!). We continue to be an international and very diverse community, now with the support of our community centre, which is doing a remarkable job in every possible way. We are blessed with several parks, sports facilities, a commercial area, a health centre just recently built and a library planned for some time in the future.

But also, twenty years after Adamstown´s birth, we have something much more important: a whole generation that has grown up in this new Ireland, being part of a diversity that´s natural to them, merging multiple cultures and building an identity that´s even more complex, rich and nuanced than that of the previous generation.

We couldn´t miss the opportunity to compile some of those stories, ten years after the original book. And that was the origin of Adamstown our home, a very special project created by two of the most beloved and admired members of our community, and quite rightly so: Father John Hassett, who also ideated and coordinated the original book, and Gema Pintor, our community centre manager. The result is a compilation of twenty more stories, several of them spanning more than one generation, of families who call Adamstown their home.

(Photo of the cover of the book Adamstown our home.)

Thanks a million, John and Gema, for counting me in on this project; I´ve really enjoyed being one of the interviewers, and I´ve also learned a lot. Thanks to the other interviewers, Anisa, Bernie, Ita, Michael, Rose and Sunita, and above all, thanks to David, Aida, Joseph, Vicky and John for the time we shared during the interviews.

The interview recordings will become part of Adamstown´s oral archive, and will be available in our library (once it´s built). In the meantime, the book is on sale now, and all proceeds will be split between the three schools in our area (two primary and one secondary) to help children with special needs.

Will there be a part three in 2035? Who knows...

Untranslatable (ish) words: overexplaining

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Today's word is a verb in English for which the exact equivalent in Spanish is very rarely used, so I'm including it in my list of untranslatables: overexplaining, loosely translated as "dar demasiadas explicaciones", that is, explaining too much..

Photo of a comic book cover: Disney´s Phineas and Ferb classic comic collection, 3 in 1

(This is the cover of a Phineas and Ferb comic book we have at home; if you´re wondering why I chose this picture, keep on reading.)

A literal translation in one word would be sobreexplicar, which does exist in the dictionary, but I never use it; I feel that if I do, I'm going to have to explain its meaning, and that's going to take me longer than saying it in a longer way 😀

Do you also tend to overexplain? I've been doing it my whole life; my sister used to point it out to me, though I've been able to reduce it considerably over the years, as I became more aware of it and kept working to progressively improve. I believe this happens mainly when we try to justify an action we've taken or a decision we've made, in order to obtain approval from someone else, or avoid their judgement.

But just as likely, it could have nothing to do with the other person. What could be happening is that, in reality, we're justifying ourselves, repeating the reasons why we do what we do, perhaps because deep down we're not entirely sure, and we think maybe things could have been done better, or perhaps because we feel a bit guilty for whatever reason.

And a third scenario I can think of is a general tendency to tiptoe through life, as if asking for permission, seeking validation for every single thing we do. Perhaps due to a constant fear of making mistakes, or a belief of not holding enough authority in certain areas, or even a feeling of not having the right to be where we are in life... This is something that mostly happens to women, and to other minorities, too. As you can imagine, self-confidence plays a significant role here.

So, what can we do about it? The first step, as always, is to become aware of it. To observe ourselves. And whenever we catch ourselves overexplaining, let's be curious and investigate what's hiding behind that behaviour. That way, we will be able to identify specific situations we can work on improving, and get more confident in the areas that matter most to us.

(By the way, if while observing we notice someone else who, in our opinion, is overexplaining, we can also exercise our curiosity and find out what's happening there: could it be that they're nervous, and it is in our power to help them somehow? Or perhaps we are the ones getting impatient and wanting them to finish, so that we can say our piece or move on to the next topic?)

We can also come to discover that, more than a lack of self-confidence in expressing ourselves, the origin is a much deeper problem: our acts and decisions not being fully aligned with our internal values, and that causing us discomfort (a version of what psychologists call cognitive dissonance). In those cases, we resort to repeating like parrots our programmed explanations, our own ones or the ones we inherited, in order to justify ourselves and make the discomfort disappear, at least for a while.

This week, I encourage you to observe how many explanations you give (or not) in any given day, and to reflect on what's behind each of those explanations. If you'd like to share your observations with me, I'll be delighted to read you.

Personally, I'm very proud of a recent achievement of mine: I was able to answer a question in the way Phineas and Ferb would. Phineas and Ferb are the main characters in an absolutely brilliant Disney Channel animation show, and my heroes when it comes to answering questions from adults with total self-confidence, and without overexplaining!

Untranslatable words: feedback

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Yesterday, I stumbled upon a very timely phrase for what I´m going through at the moment, and I realized that, as it happens, it´s not fully translatable from English to Spanish:

If you want to grow, get feedback

Feedback. That amazing word. Technically, it does have a translation, but not for this particular context, I believe.

Scrabble-like letters forming the word FEEDBACK

Surprisingly, the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language includes the word feedback as-is in its dictionary, with two meanings that reflect two different contexts: "retroalimentación" in biology (literal translations of back and feed joined in a single word), and "retorno, eco" (as in echo) related to sound (like when you place a speaker opposite a microphone and it starts screeching). Google translator offers alternative words like "realimentación" (same idea "retroalimentación") and "comentario" (as in comment), which I guess can be applied to the context or social networks, but even in that case, it sounds like a bit forced to me.

Realistically, what happened is that in the workplace, professional and creative contexts, Spanish speakers got used to the word feedback feedback as it is, without translation, for this word has a third definition in English that doesn´t exist in Spanish. According to the Oxford Dictionary, it´s "information about reactions to a product, a person's performance of a task, etc., which is used as a basis for improvement."

And what do these three definitions have in common? Well, as indicated by the word itself (feed-back, feed backwards), the result of a process is used as information to regulate the process itself. In biology (my favourite! I still remember when, as a teenager, I learned about this in school), the product of chemical reactions at a molecular or cellular level controls the reaction itself, very often to get back to a certain balance. In technology and engineering, the output from one system can be connected as an input to the same system, forming a loop that allows it to self-regulate. And in the workplace, we find out how well or how badly we´re doing things (or how much our work is liked or disliked) based on the comments we get on it.

An interesting definition I found on Wikipedia is the one proposed by Ramaprasad in the 1980´s. According to him, feedback is "information about the gap between the actual level and the reference level of a system parameter, used to alter the gap in some way". The key is in the second part of the definition: information by itself is not feedback unless it has an impact on the system, giving way to an action.

Going back to the workplace, that´s also the purpose of feedback: helping us to enhance "the system" (in this case, our abilities and performance in a specific area) using the information provided by our own results. Sounds easy, right?

But of course, it´s not easy. Why? Because we´re people, not automated mechanisms. We human beings are a lot more complex. On the one hand, no matter how much we tell ourselves we´re objective, we´re not, and that´s a fact, so we receive distorted information. From the inside, it´s difficult to truly see the results we´re producing, so we need someone to show them to us from the outside. On the other hand, "the system" here is not something separate from us; it´s actually us, so we tend to take feedback personally. Very often, we receive it as a judgement of what we do, and ultimately of who we are, instead of simply as information about the effect our specific actions produce. That´s when emotions come up, as well as thoughts, defence mechanisms, etc.

What if we could go back to the origin of this word and remember that feedback is nothing but reference information we can use to continue to improve? We need to know when we´re going too far and when we´re falling short, and the only way to find that out is to give it a try, and then analyze what happens.

Which brings me back to the phrase from the beginning: If you want to grow, get feedback. And I would add: even if it hurts a little.

All this is fresh in my mind because I´m currently waiting to receive feedback, and it´s so interesting to see everything it´s stirring up...

What about you? What are your thoughts on this?

The year of...

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2025 is starting! How are things going so far?

I like this image showing a blank notebook and a pencil, I think it's an excellent metaphor for this time of the year:

Photo of a pencil resting on an open blank notebook

What are your plans for the next twelve months? In this article I put forward two alternatives to the usual new year´s resolutions (which, being realistic, sound great but are destined never to be achieved). Today, I´m adding one more suggestion, something I heard last year but haven´t put into practice until now.

It's choosing a word as the theme for the year, something we want to focus on. This way, we create a common thread for our goals, using the word as a reminder and a source of motivation.

I´ve already chosen mine for 2025; would you like to hear it?

Drum roll...

For me, 2025 is the year of...

DECLUTTERING*

(*Explanatory note for the English version: there´s no direct Spanish translation for decluttering, which is a word I love in English and that I was sure I had included it in the list of untranslatables; apparently not, so I have a future article pending on that topic.)

So this is it! The theme for this year at our house, and not only for me; I´ve also recruited the girls. During 2024, for various reasons, we accumulated loads of things at home and didn´t get a chance to do any proper decluttering. Now is the time to free up space, and let the old go so that the new can come in.

What about you? What word do you choose? It can be anything that resonates with you and that you want to take as a priority this year. Let me know in a comment, and I´ll be delighted to read it.

Thank you, thank you, thank you

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Thanksgiving celebrations are happening this week in the United States, so it´s a great occasion to bring up the topic of gratitude again.

I´m saying "bring it up again" because we´ve touched on this topic several times already on this blog, as it couldn´t be any other way. Because gratitude is a personal development tool that´s as simple as it is powerful; that´s why I recommend it as one of the essential apps we can get "installed" in our particular hard drive.

Gratitude is a muscle that needs to be exercised every day if possible, and that requires a conscious effort to focus attention on the positive and helpful side in each situation. There may be moments, especially at the beginning, when it may be a bit hard (or even very hard) for us to find things to be grateful for, but the key is to keep looking and remember that there´s always, always, ALWAYS something, no matter how small and insignificant it may seem to us.

Or maybe the gift of the day comes in the form of teaching disguised as a challenge or difficulty, and it takes us a while to realize that. In any case, progressively, with time, patience and a lot of practice, more and more reasons to be thankful will appear, and we will feel more and more fortunate.

When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate.
And when life is bitter, say thank you and grow.

Shauna Niequist

Ready to start? It doesn´t have to be a very elaborate ritual; it may be as simple as asking yourself every night before bed, like I ask my daughters:what are grateful for today?

And here in this picture you can see my answer for today: I´m thankful for these three young ladies:

Photo of my three daughters from the back, while walking on the street