DON’T LEAVE YOUR BRAIN ON THE PILLOW

I was twenty-three when I met, by accident, the doctor who would become my mentor until the day he died.

The first time he saw me, he looked at me and said:

“You’ve got everything now.
A job, a car, money, women.
But you’re still missing one thing to be complete.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Learning how to make your brain work properly.
And above all, not leaving it on the pillow every morning, like most of humanity does.”

I stayed silent for a moment.

“And how do you do that?”

“It’s simple.
In human conversations you must never stop at what you hear.
You must immediately understand the ultimate purpose behind what is being said.”

He was a sports-medicine doctor.
The son of a baker.

For him, medicine and art were two absolute pillars.
Profession and passion together.

We became friends.

For eighteen years we talked, debated, and dissected people and situations.
He spent a great deal of time with me, even taking it away from his family.
He believed it was worth it.

Then something curious happened.

He began speaking like a salesman.
And I began speaking like a doctor.

Ahahahah.

There were only two subjects we never touched on: politics and religion.
We both knew they were the only topics capable of dividing even the best of friends.

Our intelligence did the rest.

Then I got married.
Life changed, but our friendship did not.

One day he returned to the house of the Father.

And I will never forget him again.

Sometime later my wife became pregnant.
During a medical check-up, the gynecologist heard me speaking.

At one point he called me over.

“Colleague, come here. I will show you what I am doing.”

I froze.

“Colleague? I am just a salesman.”

He burst out laughing.

“A salesman?
You speak like a doctor.
You talk about medicine and pathologies using the terminology of someone who studied medical literature.

How do you do that?”

Ahahahah.

A bit like what happened today.

I started writing, and I think like an author.
Then I started publishing, and I think like a publisher.

And in the end, I realized something simple.

I am only one thing.

A scribe.

And I simply keep doing that.

Nando