The imaginative effort involved in thinking about the world of tomorrow is a strange mixture of excitement, concern, wisdom and pure fantasy. There is nothing more tempting to abstract oneself from an unpleasant present – and even one that is pleasant – than to start rambling about what is to come next. Too often we do so in the foolish conviction that we are imagining with rigour, that we are capable of making accurate predictions even in the most changing and therefore ambiguous contexts.
However, we forget that behind the layer of illusion, also of fear, what there is is a vague doubt, an attempt at explanation, little more than a literary (verbal) act that takes place in our mind but is certainly not reality.
We’ve lost our versatility for slow tempos, which demand resignations and waiting
Projecting, anticipating, “knowing”, are inevitable impulses of our conscience, not always deliberate, that ultimately obey a need for security or, what is the same, a need to bend our fear. Whether as particular individuals or with a historical perspective of our species, that is, with a phylogenetic outlook, our survival is an end that requires us to be as alert in our minds as we are in our legs. The bad thing is that it seems that sometimes we do it more in the style of Sisyphus than in the style of heroic survivors who finally achieve definitive victories.
We are, more than beings for fear, beings perpetually challenged by fear, challenged to survive an endless cycle of threats, challenged more for courage than for self-improvement. We are a species that, for the moment, is defined by the cyclical nature of its survival.
The current circumstance of health crisis is not made for the rhythm that we had acquired – impetuous, fast, multidirectional, optimistic – or rather it is that by force of becoming impetuous and fast we have lost versatility for the slow rhythms, for a tempo that demands renunciations and waits more than certainties and consumptions. We are only learning to suffer the characteristics of that fracture, we are still delimiting its perimeter, an unavoidable process until we manage to incorporate the loss to our identity always in movement.
The human being, especially the so-called “western”, lives this circumstance overwhelmed by bewilderment but also forced to change the pace of his body and his mind, as if he had to learn a new language for his life, a new way of reading many things. Describing the perimeter of so many novelties is little by little knowing the letters and sounds of the new language (the new interpretation) that life now demands, learning to pronounce and write them, first in the form of shaky spelling and later linked together with better calligraphic performance.
At this time, a similar language was born, which we used to speak in our former lives. A dialect is born to the language we knew and we are always practicing it with that caution of temporariness, of ” for now ” and ” so far “.
We are, finally, becoming familiar with the caution of waiting to speak in the language of loss which must also be the language of renewal: the renewal of our lucidity, of our lifestyle, the finding of an improved way of interpreting the ups and downs that will follow until the end of our days.
