Adaptation, habit, learning, plasticity allow us to reinvent ourselves for survival, whether biological or intellectual in a broad sense (I mean the ability to make thoughts, points of view or decisions flexible when we seek agreement with other people).

We can see the adaptation in how we get used to the weight of clothes on our bodies, in the way we incorporate new cultures or routines. These are changes that can occur unconsciously or consciously; sometimes to keep up with the times, and other times to achieve what we want to do or become who we want to be.

First you learn, then you repeat and it becomes a habit. By sustaining it over time, that profound change occurs: plasticity, transformation. Once something has been learned, it is available as a resource, ready to be activated when we need it. Think, for example, of the ability to concentrate.

Some tasks require very little attention, but others require 100%. If we don't invest that energy, we may not achieve the expected result, or it may take much longer to achieve it and we will spend more resources than necessary.

Habit and learning also apply to concentration. We can learn to focus the mind when we want and to abstract ourselves from what is happening around us, to generate a state of full concentration.

You can start training your concentration without it being useful at that moment. Like a game. Choose a time of day, it can be at your work desk, and fix your gaze on a point in front of you — an image, a mark on the wall or some object on the table. If you see that you are dispersing, change the object on which you are focusing. Sustain the exercise for a couple of minutes. You will notice how the environment begins to blur. Once that capacity for abstraction is trained, it is time to sustain attention on the chosen point.

In this way we train the mind and thought. And when the time comes to need more attention and concentration, the habit will already be in you: your head will know what you are proposing and will play along ;)

It seems a polar wave is coming. Yesterday winter began. Today it rained, the sun came out, it got cloudy, it was cold, it was nice. A lot of diversity throughout the same day. If my decisions / plans had depended on the weather, I would have been a kite at the total mercy of stimuli. And if I had ignored my surroundings, I would definitely have had a bad time.

July, which is approaching, brings multiple themes, such as the weather today. It is my turn to write about freedom and discipline; Meanwhile, the furious wind of the beginning of winter blows, gets between the trees and to that clear climate of unease, which is sometimes experienced on Sundays, is added that of the restlessness of the wind, of what can apparently be, in the same way, kind and hostile.

I feel before this subject as one who sits before a small fire that shelters. In part it was because of this sometimes unthinkable duo —freedom and discipline— that years ago, one day, I decided that I wanted to teach the DeRose Method. It was the combination of those two things that I didn't know it was possible to put together. I call discipline, in my case, the ability to build anything: paint a picture, run a school, write a book of poems, sustain a bond, train something consistently (beyond the weather). I call discipline the sum of little bricks that give existence to what we want to carry out. And freedom, the way we build it. Without that reaching the point of subduing us. Being able to build, create, carry out projects, relationships, life itself without it being at our expense. It seems obvious, but it is not. That is why it often happens to us that, even doing what we like, something is not being as we wanted. And not because everything has to be as we want, far from it. But sometimes we have that clear feeling of being aware of more, that what we want to do so much is occupying places that belong to other things, even that it has lost its course and overflows everywhere.

I thought that freedom and discipline permeate the way we train in schools, but also our way of teaching, working and building. Not because we always do well, but because it is a variable that we take into account when making decisions, I would almost say when doing anything.

Discipline brings us the possibility of building. Freedom, to establish a bond with what we are creating, whether individually or collectively; a loving, considerate, powerful, channeled and therefore lasting bond. I don't know if you've ever wondered how freedom and discipline coexist in you, but know that they are a great duo and, when they go hand in hand in a project, they unleash unexpected potential.