A completely unexpected situation and bordering on the surreal. But it’s real. And it affects the whole world at the same time. Those who do not live it up close find it difficult to understand its seriousness and urgency.
Italians, who do not live in the northern regions most affected, but look at them closely, feel discomfort and solidarity for the pain and fatigue that people are suffering there, we are afraid that the same nightmare may come to us, we do not realize that the virus is already among us, because a few thousand contagions we have here sound nothing compared to the tens thousands they have only at a short distance from us – and we think we are immune, as we always think, from many other diseases, until it affects you too. But it is enough for one infected person who, unaware that he is, pay little attention to protect others around, to create ten more infected people.
The experience that our families, our friends and acquaintances in the north are experiencing, resembles the war stories of our grandparents: they are not bad soldiers who come to take you home and bring you to extermination, they are doctors, angels who come to take and endanger their own lives to heal and save you if possible.
The experience is very similar anyway! They take you away and you don’t know if you will return – your family will be informed in a few days how you are, or if you are dead and when they can have your ashes!
So everything stopped, everyone at home.
Instead of living it as a protection that the country reserves for you, someone lives it as a punishment.
We’re at home. And at home we discover that it is not easy to establish a balance of peaceful coexistence between the members of the family, a balance that lasts more than one w / e, it is not easy, but … you have to find it and also in conditions of constraint, for someone in small spaces, without an outdoor outlet, … it’s not easy at all.
It is not easy to give up your usual sporting activity, your social life, the simplest daily habits, even the most frenetic moments of work becomes a great sacrifice for someone.
Stop, look in the mirror, look at who is with you (if you are lucky enough to have someone with you) and talk to each other, it is not obvious. Maybe we’re not really used to it. Because? Because it is not easy. It is easier to run and postpone to another time.
But now we’re forced home, and after hours watching TV and internet to collect news to be super-informed – waiting for that peak that OK now it goes down and ends – we understand that the matter will not be so fast…
Virtual sociality peaks even faster than contagion.
Another type of sociality also begins, which has never found space in our busy life, chatting with our neighbor from balcony to balcony. Let’s sing together. If you need, call me.
And we find out activities that we always a bit snubbed, because I don’t have time, I’m busy, it’s boring, I’m too stressed to doing that – making bread, yoga, cooking, reading, listening to music, writing, playing with a child, invent new games. …Well yes, it’s not bad!
They become new topics of conversation with friends – by phone because we have time to entertain ourselves on the phone instead of communicating with flash messages – and with our neighbor from the balcony of course.
And we think, think, think, looking for a reason for all this. And we become more and more aware of the many and important consequences that all this will entail.
And maybe we understand.
We can understand that our land is beautiful and rich. The resources of our land are -would be- infinite. The models that our land offers us are perfect models. Trampling and destroying all this to chase much less perfect models, with much less ingenious means, to transform our earth into a much less beautiful and much poorer planet, is absolutely idiotic.
But, isn’t man an intelligent animal?!? ….
Maybe we have time to adjust the course.
