The Portuguese word confidence comes from the Latin CONFIDENTIA of CONFIDERE, "to fully and firmly believe," formed by COM that intensifies, plus FIDERE, "believe, trow," which derives from FIDES, "faith". The same etymology is found in English, CONFIDENCE, which also derives from Latin; in French, CONFIANCE; in Italian, FIDUCIA of FIDERE, same translation as above; CONFIANZA in Spanish, and so on. This way we can understand that the word reminds us of the universal posture of certainty, conviction, dete-mination, strength, safety, and more, hope, faith, optimism, and still, liveliness and resilience. There is no doubt that the words have influence on our lives and serve as a stimulus to our behav-iour in the face of adversity.
However, words and the stimuli raised by words should not be taken only as pills of optimism, as if they were miracle drugs that give us the solution to our prob-lems. Words are the result of the elaboration of thought and, as such, should express the good feelings that we bring with us. When we say this, we do not claim that self-help would be effective as an immediate therapy because, as such, it only leads to analgesia, not curing the diseases of the soul.
In the documentary Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, based on the book The Consolations of Philosophy, by the Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton, he highlights six great thinkers on important topics of our daily lives, and high-lights the confidence with Socra-tes: "Socrates walked through the market addressing people and questioning about the meaning of life in a very interesting way, but also in a very annoying way. If you ask for the explanations of people's beliefs, they often react ag-gressively. Socrates had no such inhibitions. He would rather be considered forceful than to allow his compatriots to carry on their lives without thinking. His intention was to make everyone reevaluate their beliefs, he believed that everyone had the duty to reflect on their lives, and that we all have the capacity to do it."
Socrates paid a high price for helping people to think, to assess the inconsistency of their existences, and for en-couraging the change of their poor goals (when they had them), poor because they focused only on the here and now.
Confidence comes at the moment when we know, through philosophical deduction, who we are, what we are doing here and where we will go. When we deepen these deductions with the help of the Spiritist Philosophy, this universe expands. We are not only citizens of a country, we are citizens of the Universe. Our lives are not con-fined to the present moment; we discover that we are heirs of the conquests of past reincarnations on route to a future full of achieva-ble promises; we learn that every-thing is temporary in the words of the Spirit Emmanuel (even the missed opportunities).
So we know that personal dramas have their duration and the achievements, in turn, should expand in the proportion that we conduct ourselves with absolute moral tranquillity.
We live today in a world full of conflicts that reproduce individual psychopathologies. Of course it is
difficult to trust on this construction, however, we have eternity ahead of us and the present moment to build, as best as we can, knowing we can count on the support and encouragement of the Spirits who love us.
Sonia Theodoro da Silva
Bachelor in Philosophy
