At the beginning of 2022, my high school teacher, Andres Tapia, contacted me and proposed that I give a talk at school. He had seen my Instagram post about a phrase I had written and turned into a sticker. If you want to know more about that sticker, you can read more by clicking here. The phrase was "Yesterday was, today I am, and tomorrow I will be". I came up with that phrase after a personal journey struggling with an idea I had about becoming my past self again.

In the past, I thought that my high school version of myself was the best version I could aspire to be. I thought that version had it all - personal growth, attitude, charisma, among other things. I thought I had lost myself and would never be the same again. I tried everything I could to become that person again - strict diets to maintain my weight, trying to do the same things and hold on to the same things. But in the talk I gave to the students, I mentioned that no matter how much I tried to become that version of myself, I only drifted further away.

It was during a walk with my dog that I realized and thought, "Why do I want to become a person I already was, instead of giving myself the opportunity to become a better person?" I realized that my high school version of myself wasn't as perfect as I thought. I had made mistakes and there were things that could be improved. So, I said:

"Okay, I want to be a version of myself. I can't become you again, but I can embrace the things I liked about you and that I feel are beneficial to maintain in the long run."

The phrase aims to communicate the idea that we all make mistakes, that nobody is perfect in this world, and that it's okay. Some days will be good, some days will be bad, but we should think that yesterday we were one person, today we are different people, and tomorrow we will be different people. Change is a constant in our lives, so we shouldn't be afraid of it. It's easier said than done many times, but I feel it's something we have to remember.

At that time, I had just finished the first semester of my degree, and we had a class called Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). In this class, we covered various topics such as inheritance, abstraction, etc. Around that time, I had an idea that I played with most of the time, where I tried to relate everything to a box. If you're interested in knowing more about my idea of boxes, you can click here.

In summary, the idea is that everything can be seen as a box to understand things. During that time, I started reading a book called "Sophie's World". I have never been so hooked on a book like this before. I went from not reading anything to waiting for online classes to finish so that I could start reading. The book was approximately 500 pages long, and I finished it in less than 3 weeks. It's one of the most beautiful and educational stories I have ever read, and I highly recommend it.

In the book, the idea of Plato's world of ideas stuck with me. According to Plato, there was the physical and material world, and the world of ideas. He called the ideas sacred molds, from which objects in the physical world emerged. After reading that, I started thinking about boxes. Those molds were like Lego boxes. If you want to build a horse, you need:

• 1 Horse head
• 1 Horse torso
• 4 Hoofed legs
• 1 Tail

These pieces together construct the idea of a horse, but individually they build other ideas. So, I realized and said, "We are like boxes". In the end, we can all have the same pieces or DNA, but how everything is structured determines our differences. As the famous scientist Carl Sagan said, "The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."

I continued with the talk and told them that in my idea, when we come into this world, we are little boxes that already come with things inside - our genes, which were determined by our parents' DNA, and the environment, among other things. But as we grow, other people start putting things inside us. If you were born into a Christian family, you were given all the content related to that religion. If you were born in Mexico, then at school you were given all the information about how Mexico emerged, all the wars, and stories that are part of our culture, among other things.

And most importantly, the language. Depending on the country where you were born, you were taught a language to communicate with others. In my case, it was Spanish, but for others, it's English, German, Japanese, Italian, etc. I also asked the kids the question, "What do we consider to be the most our own and what is the most unowned?" None of them knew how to answer that question. The answer is our NAME. We didn't choose our name; our parents did. We didn't choose the school we attended to a certain extent; our parents did. It conditioned the friends we had, the experiences we had, and even the possible partners we had.

At one point, I became too deterministic, to the point where a boy asked me, "If I don't decide anything, then who am I?" I was taken aback; I didn't know what to answer. Obviously, I don't know who he is, much less who I am 100%. I discovered that nobody knows themselves 100% because we are always changing. As they say in the book, the only way to know something 100% is if that something is dead or unchanging. So, the only moment where we can fully know ourselves is when we die.

I told him that I would take the idea of him - everything he had to go through to exist. Let's say this boy's name was Pepe. There won't be another Pepe in this city, with the same parents, the same age, the same school, at this very moment, who won't have the same experiences as him. In the end, I finished the talk by talking about the books I had read before ending the talk and how they had helped me learn more about philosophy. I remember at one point a girl from the audience asked me, "What was the name of the first book you read?" I told her, "Sophie's World", and instantly I heard her shout, "I already bought it!"

I was amazed at how the kids connected so much with the topic that they wanted to buy the books I had read. In the end, we had some questions, and some stayed later for more personal questions. I gave this talk three times in total; they were the first talks I had ever given in my life, and I am very grateful to the students and to my teacher, Andres, for inviting me and receiving me in such a way. In the future, there will be more interesting talks where I hope to continue sharing my knowledge with others.

I hope you enjoyed this story. Thank you very much for reading. :)