As Gilberto Gil used to say, “life is confusion.” I discovered this literally at age 59, when I decided to celebrate with a big party (much more fun than celebrating the obvious sixty!), whose very theme was: “life, the precious confusion.” The idea was simple. Celebrate the art of living as the ability to handle, for better or worse, the inevitable chaos of existence. Flexibility in the face of challenges, valuing what we learn in difficult moments, making lemonade out of lemons, turning trouble into opportunity.

And I took it seriously. The soundtrack for the party’s “audio-invitation” was ‘Concerto for piano and little dog, in C major,’ in which, in the middle of a recording of me playing piano, our dog Zé Pequeno starts barking (for the curious, it’s worth “listening to the invitation” in the audio article). I complain to him, tell him to stop. Since he doesn’t obey, suddenly I realize… it’s cool! And we start making music together! My daughters say it’s toxic positivity. But I insist and keep believing, until proven otherwise, that it’s worth trying to find the best side of… almost everything. The luck of being alive on this incredible planet brings us the obligation to honor it and celebrate it.

As for the party, of course, it was a portrait of this mix in every sense. Starting with the food: instead of a ‘harmonized buffet,’ the jumble of the city’s tastiest things—from Sônia’s lamb rice to Gurume’s sushi, from Celeiro’s salads to Momo’s pear ice cream, ending with grilled bread, filtered coffee, and Dengo’s chocolate at dawn! A chaotic and delicious menu, just like life really is. A precious confusion, chosen, cultivated, celebrated. And, when I realized it, I saw: more than food, music, and art, my greatest wish, when investing time, energy, and money to bring together 250 friends, was to create a space for meetings. Different people, from diverse worlds, sharing music, dance, conversation. And it worked! Twelve hours of party where we celebrated unusual mixtures, chaos, catalyzing diversity. My daughters’ friends with my father’s friends, lifelong siblings meeting friends of friends who arrived. And so it went…

At heart, that’s what celebrations do: they bring people together. And parties are the origin of culture. From harvest festivals to rituals for the dead, culture emerges from this human need to share reasons for staying together as a group, as families, as nations.

Maybe that’s why it was so symbolic that, the next day, Sunday, September 21, this catharsis happened on a national scale. Brazil, plunged into massive confusion, with judgements, fiery speeches, turbulence and all sorts of noise, and then, at Copacabana Beach, a huge festival for freedom and democracy catalyzes the crowd. Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Djavan and Paulinho da Viola gathering more than 40,000 people on the sidewalks and sand. There, culture worked like a magnet, a pole of attraction able to bring together different people: left, right, conservatives and progressives. (After all, who really doesn’t like these guys?) People who, in another context, would be separated by our almost insurmountable ideological walls, but who, at that moment, shared the same space, the same song, the same sense of belonging. Culture dissolves boundaries. It brings together, connects, mixes, creates ties, complicity, common meaning.

And history is full of the best examples. Whenever freedom is threatened, culture rises up as a trench. Woodstock in 1969 was the symbolic response of a generation to the Vietnam War. The Diretas Já movement in the 1980s only gained strength because musicians, actors, and poets lent their voices to the collective desire. Rock in Rio in 1985 was more than entertainment: it was the baptism of a democracy that was still finding its way. The fall of the Berlin Wall was celebrated in concert because music knew what politics couldn’t yet express. From Tunisian rap during the Arab Spring to exile songs of Caetano and Gil, history shows that it’s always culture that opens cracks when walls seem insurmountable. And it’s exactly because of its capacity to activate resistance that every authoritarian leader invests heavily against it, belittling it, censoring it.

Politics oscillates, advances and retreats; some win, others lose, and vice versa. Culture is different. It might be muffled for a period, but it always reemerges. Culture is the invisible, but powerful, field in which belonging is sown, essential values are remembered, and the future is projected. It is the ecology of freedom. And maybe that’s why, in the face of confusion, violence, and the kind of craziness and surrealism we’re witnessing in the world, only art can save us!