Sim, esta publicação é a minha primeira tentativa de escrever algo em inglês no Mantenotas (que não seja um poema, vide Aphorisms). Este atentado contra a língua inglesa, meio mal escrito, mas escrito com o coração, é fruto da minha motivação futura de expandir o público do Mantenotas. A gente tem que começar por algum lugar não é mesmo?
Publicações no Mantenotas serão agora todas as terças-feiras (faz parte da minhas resoluçãos de ano novo pra 2024), portanto…
Enjoy!
By now, as of 2024, we are still being conditioned to make ourselves famous. Or to consume famous people who we want to model ourselves in to.
And through the whole of social media activities we are being trained to want. To want to get more likes on Instagram, to want our political rambles to be read on Facebook, to want the shares, the retweets, the attention.
And this is a lack of something that I also find missing in my day-to-day strolls, which is:
Local Heroes.
Local heroes are nothing more nothing less than people who are not on the internet, who are not famous, who does not have a hundred thousand followers, who are not influencers... and if you told them they could be all that, they simply woudn't want to.
You definetly don't want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.
~ Kevin Kelly
But these unknown figures have the capacity to change your life, to impact strong impressions upon your soul, which can not be atributted to their status, fame, richness or likeability (or public likeability anyway).
And we need them. We need inspiring people from our reality so we can know others realities. To know another world which transcends our own world view by fully grasping it.
What I mean by grasping it is:
Local heroes are the bridge between us, our identity, and the whole world.
Needless to say the world as we have it today changed a lot.
As Paul Publisher says in his Zeitville Chronicle's, there is no "big tent" society anymore, no public square, no international broadcast that everyone in the world is talking about. This is gone post 2020, for real.
Thus, we only have a "patchwork" of public discourse, decentralized, hyper local. And, off course, we also have the voyagers & vanguards who understand this new reality and explore it, always discerning in between each web of tribal territory they are stepping by1.
And I'm not gonna lie. I also find myself missing big tent society, and chasing some kind of fame. Bringing my awareness to that fact, I can only suspect that this longing is, in fact, a lack of contact and connection with my local heroes.
When I think about them, and when I think about heroes that I met through the internet - by sheer luck, because many of them are not really that famous - I am more inspired by their peace of mind than how much numbers they get per post.
Online examples: Thomas J. Bevan, writes The Commonplace; Paul Publisher, cited above; Jamie Mcsloy, who writes… a lot of stuff. Also, that guy Nick-E from Bodyweight Fitness subredit, who wrote an entire begginer-calisthenic-routine for free all on his own... Again, they are not famous, not in my world at least, but they do an awesome job of bringing knowledge, impact and life changing stuff upon the surface of the internet.
And if they were not at the internet, my guess is that they would still be awesome local heroes, as teachers, coaches, writers, whatever their field is, be it in their region, whatever city they are from, or even as nomads.
Remember where you come from
Well, writing about it got me thinking: Do I know or remember any local heroes from my city?
Yes I do! I had a lot of yoga teachers here, who shall not be named for the sake of their privacy, that taught me a lot - not only about yoga, but many many facets of life which transcends a typical yoga lesson. I had also bought online mobility and yoga courses, downloaded the exercises, the diet plan and all the stuff that in theory is more than sufficient for you to "succeed" in the course, to learn the asanas...
Nonetheless these fall short in comparison to the offline classes simply because the latter are personal experiences, face-to-face, with eye contact.
This type of connection is a lusting need in today's world, where we often have only our intimate partners/SO as heroes (i.e. someone that understands us and the whole of our struggles).
But the concept of "local heroes" we are playing with here doesn't need to be intimate - he or she or they just need to have a honest connection with you.
And even if it is a paid relationship, that is to say, transactional, in no way the transaction affects the purity of mutual fulfilling that accompanies real interactions with people who love their job and the outputs they get from it.
So yeah, meet your local heroes. Go out into your city, so that you can meet the people who share their origins, their hobbies, their dreams and ambitions with you.
Then, and only then, you can outgrow the boundaries of the world you live by fulfilling all the vague space that are yet to be fulfilled within it. With this attitute you naturally begin to respect your own weird, unique and admirable world...
Until later!
- Mauro
O próximo post do Mantenotas (da semana que vem) é uma incógnita, um mistério, um desavanço civilizacional, mas provavelmente será em português! Até lá:
This idea is explored thoroughly in Paul's Newsletters, and if you have affinity with astrology and/or storytelling, I definitely recommend you to check it.