Polish is the only language I know in which you cant’t simply go somewhere,
but you need to precise whether you walked, drove or flew.
And I’m a writer, so I sometimes imagine
that Poles are a different kind of hominid, Homo driving,
while the rest of us, homo erectus descendants,
walk around, trying to invent the wheel.
Because for Poles the most important is not the destination,
but how to arrive. We all have the same life journey,
but Poles are the only ones to travel in class.
Once a Brit got angry at me during an argument and called me a fool.
As a writer, I admire fools, because they were the only ones allowed to openly criticize the king,
disguising wisdom as foolishness. So I quoted Shakespeare to him:
“The wise know they are fools, while fools think they are wise.”
Once I accidentally blocked a Polish biker’s way and he crushed against a post.
He told me: Are you a wise man? Which reminded me of a Lao Tzu quote:
“The wiser you are, the more foolish you seem.”
So I looked at his broken bike and answered him with another Lao Tzu quote:
“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”
The first Polish girl I liked, once was depressed and told me: Why I’m so hopeless?
Which melted my heart, so I told her: Please, don’t cry anymore.
Since that day, hopeless became one of my favorite Polish words,
so every time a girl I like looks depressed,
I tell her: Please, don’t cry anymore. You’re hopeless.
When they learn I’m Argentinean, some Poles tell me
that they dream with going to Buenos Aires,
which is not a real dream, but a two way ticket by plane.
But as a writer once said: Life is a dream within a dream,
and I like the Polish style: keeping dreams simple,
to more easily wake up to the futility of our everyday lives.
Some people are green, and care about their carbon footprint,
although they keep buying bottled water.
But Kafka’s Metamorphosis already showed us
that we’re all cockroaches, the toughest creature on Earth,
predating dinosaurs. Surely a little of tap water won’t extinguish us.
***
