- The Never-Told Story -
To mi friends of "Real Men Go Barefoot"
As a
barefooter who after several decades of experiments and experiences, I have sometimes
come to understand what happens in the self when one adopts this practice, and
why it is sometimes so difficult to persevere in it, already from my lonely beginnings I wondered
if there would be some progressive "method" to eventually get to do
it without effort or negative consequences such as repentance or "moral
hangover", since as we that are inside it know, “once a barefooter, always
a barefooter”, paraphrasing the well-known English saying.
Because the
"problem" that occurs when you want to be frequent or permanently
barefoot is of a psychological nature, not immanent but induced from outside
through a simple mechanism: when an individual adopts the IDEOLOGY of his
society, it becomes part of his PSYCHOLOGY, thus determining his personal
reactions. In "shoded" societies like ours, where it is frowned upon
to go barefoot, that idea that we already have inside makes us feel
uncomfortable and even embarrassed to stay on our bare feet: a "strange
modesty", I have called it. Although it could also be interpreted as a
kind of "soft" addiction to footwear, along its corresponding
symptoms of abstinence.
In the
first case, the indicated procedure would be to generate an opposing ideology
that would eventually replace the social one adverse to barefooting, through a
positive rationalization of our own practice while we share it with others,
socializing it: a kind of COUNTER-PROPAGANDA. In the second one, it would be a
program of detoxification, with increasingly prolonged periods of abstinence.
The first
item is precisely what we barefooters have been doing intuitively through local groups, wider associations and social networks, with all that exchange of experiences that, by
enriching and strengthening us, they keep us in our initial purpose, namely, to
arrive one day to live barefoot as the most natural thing, as indeed it is.
The second
one, I think, is where PEDAGOGY has a lot to do, designing programs tailored to
each barefooter through which he or she can acquire new habits of barefooting,
more resistant to adverse social pressure, that guarantee a reasonably further advance in their learning curve. (That something like that is perfectly possible, I know from my pedagogical experience in other areas, especially Music.)
The basic process is similar to a military campaign, in which new territories are conquered while retaining those previously obtained. In the case discussed, it would be a matter of adding, for purposes of barefooting, new territories of our daily activity without ceasing to exercise the latter in those already mastered.
So the answer to the question of the title cannot be other than a sound ... YES!
Fernando Acosta Reyes (@ferstarey) is founder of the Investigative Society of the Strange (SIDLE), professional musician and student of social behavior.
Imagen: lovevda.it
