Love equation

"If one day
My heart would be consulted
To know if it has been wrong
It will be difficult to deny it" *

One day, after many (more than usual) months trying to find an answer to a problem, completely stuck, I heard from my advisor at a group meeting with all the doctoral students:

"Nobody here has good results! That depresses me!" (shouting, with a very red face).

Little did he know that depression hung over all of us.

It had been many months since I had very difficult moments while working on finishing my doctorate.

One day in a class for doctoral students, after seeing the same slide presented in a slightly different version by another professor, I had a click. It was a click that made me understand how to change that story of getting stuck. Or at least how to try.

The slide:

My observations:

- Beginning of the whole system: Model's motivation, in pink. First click.

- In each of the steps there is an arrow, in dark pink, that goes back to each of the previous steps, especially the motivation. Second click.

What were my real motivations up until then? To satisfy my supervisor's expectations (I know, not ideal).

Understanding that the motivation was wrong helped a lot, but it still hadn't solved the problem.

Clarity came when I understood that love was missing from my motivation. It was there, in fact, but I wasn't accessing it. It was actually hatred that came rushing inside of me when I tried to improve my model and write mathematical formulas.

I wanted to HAVE, not TO BE. I wanted to have a model, not to be a person with that learning.

And in that learning, I didn't even know that love had to enter the equation.

"Lives in philosophy
Why rhyme love and pain?" **

Love (amor) rhymes with pain (dor) in Portuguese

I decided to stop making suffering my motivation and add the looping:

motivation = learning, with love

during every remaining day of my doctorate project. And that's how I got to finish it feeling much lighter.

*1st song: "Foi um rio que passou em minha vida" (It was a river that passed in my life) - Paulinho da Viola (1970)

**The other song: "Mora na filosofia" (Lives in philosophy) - Caetano Veloso (1972)

The slide: Parameter estimation and modeling, modified by me.