Iara Lima

 “Essa canção é por você – (This song is for you)
Que já cansou de escutar – (Who is tired of listening)
Esteve vivo sem viver – (You were alive without living)
Mas não deixou de acreditar” – (But you never stopped believing)

This excerpt is part of the lyrics of a song called Balada da Contramão, by one of my favorite bands: A Banda Mais Bonita da Cidade (The Most Beautiful Band in Town).

Yes! That is the translation of the band’s name.

Sometimes I think there is a verb that is rarely remembered, but that perhaps explains more interrupted dreams than any other: to dispose.

Many people talk. Few people conjugate the verb.

That’s it.

“Esteve vivo sem viver” – (You were alive without living)

We have the habit of putting off everything we think or plan for fear of failure, even before we try. We wait for certainty, security, planning, money, time, knowledge, courage. We wait to be ready.

But perhaps that moment never comes.

We won’t always have a plan for how things should unfold. Much needs to happen in the spur of the moment, being adjusted as the experience itself shows us. It’s like when you take the first step and realize the road wasn’t exactly ready waiting for you. It simply begins to appear as you walk.

That’s how I started this website.

I didn’t know how to build a page, configure plugins, or write a line of CSS. I learned because I needed to learn. Not before. Along the way. And soon everything will be redecorated.

There is a difference between wanting something and being willing to go through the process necessary to find it. Wanting belongs to the realm of imagination. Disposing belongs to the realm of experience.

When you dispose yourself, you accept that you will make mistakes, and you accept that something may need to be redone. It’s starting small and discovering, along the way, that what you imagined you wanted might not be exactly what you wish to build.

Disposition does not mean courage. Nor does it mean confidence or absence of fear. Sometimes it simply means doing something despite being afraid.

It’s putting your body in motion before your mind has managed to organize all the answers.

And there is another thing in the verb to dispose.

It also speaks about placing something at one’s disposal, offering space, putting time, attention, energy, and presence into something.

Perhaps that is precisely where the hardest part lies.

“Eu vou tentar mais uma vez – (I will try once more)
Por quem não pode mais tentar” – (For those who can no longer try)

When I decided to graduate again, I wasn’t just choosing a new education, a second career transition; I was actually disposing time, energy, and a part of my life toward a possibility that I didn’t even know exactly where it would lead me, and honestly, I’m still finding out.

I’ve heard that it was too late to change fields, to go back to studying, or to start from scratch. Curiously, university taught me exactly the opposite.

I never found an age for learning.

I only found people at different moments of the same crossing.

There were people starting at twenty and others arriving at university after forty. There were those who were there to build a profession and those who were simply discovering a new way of understanding the world.

That was when I realized that perhaps age is a very poor measure for what we can still become.

The problem is usually not age.

It’s the image we construct of ourselves within the life we imagine we should have.

We anticipate others’ judgment and, often, start living inside a conversation that hasn’t even happened.

It’s curious because we spend much more time imagining others’ judgment than actually being observed by them.

While we think about what someone might say, that person is probably busy thinking about their own life.

In the end, many of the limitations we believe are imposed by society have already been internalized by ourselves.

That’s where the verb to dispose reappears.

Because to dispose also means accepting that we don’t fully control the outcome.

You can prepare the ground, study, research, organize, calculate, plan. Still, there is a part of the path that only appears after you begin. That’s why the first step is so important.

Not because it guarantees you will arrive exactly where you imagined.

But because it produces information, you discover what works and what doesn’t; what you like and what you need to let go of.

You discover paths that weren’t on the map. And, sometimes, you discover a version of yourself that didn’t exist before that experience.

Looking today at this online writing space, I see that quite clearly.

The first text I published here was also a leap.

In the language of the tarot, perhaps it was the Fool.

Not because I knew where that leap would lead me, but because I understood that some paths only appear after the first step.

And perhaps that is what I would like to say when I speak of disposing.

We don’t need to be ready to begin.

We need to be available to learn what the path will demand of us.