david pinto

Three life-decisions stand out so far in my life.

With my high school grades, I was accepted unconditionally to study pure maths at university. I remember looking through the Reader’s Digest Encyclopedia and coming across the amount of deforestation of the Amazon. This was the late 80’s. I had noticed the problems of famines in the world and homelessness closer to home, while history seemed to be told as a sequence of wars. Things were unfair, at home and at school and clearly in the world, but I had never objected. Like the kids at school who had been racially abusive, it wasn’t personal. My parents weren’t to blame, nor teachers, nor politicians or business folk. Whatever the problem was, it was social, and the evidence of deforestation was an obvious non-human effect. With this in mind, I resolved to switch subjects and study the social issue from the widest possible angle. I attended Edinburgh University in order to study Social Anthropology, providing access to study non-western and non-modern cultures. The course was doubly attractive because it contained fieldwork so I wouldn’t be stuck in a library. This was a big decision. In retrospect, the decision was premature. I would have garnered more respect had I attained a maths degree. On the other hand, had I devoted myself to maths, my life would have taken a more traditional path. As it was, social anthropology laid the groundwork for the discovery of ABC State as ‘fieldwork’ in education (V-2), and the cognitive maths of XQ (V-1).

The second big event occurred in my late twenties. A bona-fide ‘life-death’ decision arising from heartbreak. The result? A decision to be real versus fictive, to combine the service of my mother and the peculiar iconoclastic quality of my father. To question the fundamentals of mainstream life for the betterment of all; surely this couldn’t be rejected or go neglected? Sensing my ‘life purpose’, my mother warned me, insightful of what would have happened to her husband had he not met her and begun a family: you may live and die alone. It was a risk I was willing to take. I had lived a good life up to that point, strong roots. Now it was a matter of giving back. But my gosh, does the world take, take, take. I wrote up my experiences throughout the years but never promoted or even shared them. It collected my thoughts in a book entitled Wisdom: A Conversational Tango. Without promotion, my friends and family could not preven it sinking without a trace.

Beyond engaging kids in classes and helping the odd relative or friend escape from critical existential troubles, I failed to bring about any change in mainstream education (V-2) or transpose my learnings to the adult world (V2). I gave up, and wished to retreat down an interesting path in maths lit up my students (V-1), potentially a deadend nevertheless a pursuit I could explore freely without assistance. The third decision came from a shock to the system. I was blessed with a daughter. Earlier in my life, a dissipated sense of service had replaced personal love, and I did not wish to bring another human being to the world given its state. Once a decision was made, I switched and considered the event a blessing, a wonder, a joy. Sadly, this was not to be and I lost my daughter to unfortunate circumstances. The brief experience of fatherhood redoubled my commitment to find solutions for all children, taking the form of an alternative economic (V3) which could thereby enable whole system change in a generation, Fulcrum.