Instability. I confess: the deepest reflections… | by Flávia Alvim | Aug, 2025
I confess: the deepest reflections don’t always come from hours of theological study. Sometimes, they emerge from the most unexpected of places — like a computer screen that simply ‘froze.’ As an exegete, I’m used to dealing with the precision of words and the order of texts. But what about when life itself proves to be chaotic, disorganized, and… unstable? This is what this text aims to discuss. It is a piece of my own journey, of how a small digital interruption made me dive into big existential questions.
It got messed up. It got tangled. It got disorganized. I thought to myself: “What happened?”. My eyes couldn’t believe it. My lips wouldn’t open. My ears closed. Insistently, I questioned in front of the computer screen: “What is happening, after all?”. Clicking here and there with the mouse, the hypertext wasn’t responding to my commands. Everything was unstable!
What is instability? Wouldn’t its definition be the lack of that which is fixed, permanent, and stable? Of course it would. But why does everything seem unbalanced, without lines or contours? Ah, I see… Wouldn’t these be certain adversities that present themselves in my condition, as I exist and live? Yes, yes… But, at this moment, this instability installed in my PC is affecting me. It’s not just the PC, with its functionality of displaying a hypertext, that is becoming unstructured, but I myself am in the same way. And what does this want to show me? Ah… I know!
Just as in the web’s hypertext and as the PC as a machine, I, in my existence as a human, will go through moments of instability, unstructuredness, and imbalance. I am not programmed to know the necessary algorithms for correction, nor are there techniques that can free me from what leaves me adrift in the ignorance of the reasons why everything occurs, happens so suddenly. I just know that difficult periods happen to us so that we can grow. I can’t always remain as I am. We are not fixed beings. We are always moving towards… We walk in the direction of… In fact, we are like arrows heading for a single target. It’s just that there are people who prefer to throw themselves at other points around the target, because directing oneself to it has its conditions of renunciation, sacrifice, and self-domination, sometimes, of what one most desires…
Machines do not work with a destination for something, but they work to supply human needs, not in their physiological-biologized sense. But in their widely sociocultural sense. Machines do not feed a hungry body, be it for bread or for words of life. Machines are utilitarian equipment, objects that fulfill their function of socialization and production, only… I can’t put my whole life in the hands of a machine that codes some numbers… Aren’t numbers a human creation, just like machines? So be it. How can I find stability, emancipation, and calm in a machine that is still a creation subject to defects, errors, and mistakes, just like myself? Ah… It is a sweet illusion to believe that a machine or a hypertext can satisfy me and feed me with good energies, as well as save me!
That’s it… The way is to surrender to something that cannot be coded by machines or interpreted clearly by science. I think I opt for the impossible. I place my security in the celestial blue, believing that between the clouds, even if they are overcast or with a tendency for storms, there is a place that has no beginning or end. It is an eternal spring. It is life without physiological dependencies. It is being without conditionality. It is living without existing. So… I will calm my heart, breathing deep into my being and find solutions for this XML — HTML coding problem, also because in heaven there is only one answer in a triple relationality, unlike the various tags I will have to analyze in the coding of a hypertext — HTML.
