Dad’s going over there to change the world and will be right back.

There are verses that settle within us with the subtlety of someone who doesn’t ask for permission. The one by 4 e Meia — “Dad’s going over there to change the world and will be right back,” from the song Meu Amor Dorme Bem — is one of those. In the song, it sounds almost sweet, even moving, but when we bring it into real life and cross it with the world we live in — so noisy, so fast-paced, so full of overlapping urgencies — it ceases to be a melody and becomes a mirror. A mirror of justified absence, of postponed time, of a touch turned into a promise.

After all, what kind of “world” is this that so many people are trying to change? The professional world? The world of expectations? The world of crises that never truly get resolved? Or this larger world, where everything always seems too far away to touch us and, at the same time, close enough to demand our opinion, reaction, immediate intervention?

We live in an era where being busy has become a symbol of value. A full calendar is pride; silence is failure; a pause, a suspicious luxury. At a time when the entire planet seems to live in a permanent state of alert, we almost believe that it is mandatory to always be in motion, always contributing, always “doing something.” And so, with the best intentions, we all start to repeat the phrase from the song — not literally, but through our actions. We go “over there” to change something: a project, a goal, a cause, a status, an urgency the world throws into our hands. We go “over there” to put out fires — real ones, metaphorical ones, ones we’re not even sure concern us. And in an instant, we realize that we haven’t arrived… we are always on our way.

And, without noticing, we stop being just “the dad” from the song.

We become ourselves:
We go over there to change the world and will be right back.
We say it in a thousand ways — in emails, in causes we embrace superficially, in fleeting but increasingly frequent indignations, in silences justified by haste — but the essence is the same: we are always going, rarely staying.

The problem is that, along the way, we neglect what was simplest, most ours, and most urgent: the people. Those nearby and those far away. Those who need help now, not at a calendared time of year. The young, who trade play for distractions. The elderly, who wait for conversations that never come. Our own and others’, those who learn to turn absence into routine. And ourselves, who lose the rare skill of simply being.

There is a strange irony in the fact that we live in a time when so much is said about “changing the world,” yet so little about taking care of it. When causes and debates are amplified, but the quiet, available, real gesture — the one that doesn’t give medals or status, but transforms profoundly — is forgotten.