The world is experiencing a deep crisis, everyone is called to change their lifestyle and reorganize their future, suspending most of their own projects. The present is severely limited and the future seems to be blocked. Therefore, it is not indifferent how institutions, the economy, the whole social sphere and, above all, how individuals react.
The only point at which we are not stuck and on which we have ample freedom of movement is our interiority, our flow of thoughts, emotions, our images in search of a “well-being” that is compromised. The health emergency therefore becomes the trigger for a wider, social and inner emergency. To all this we can give completely irrational responses, feel anxiety, denial, fanaticism and, in general, we can activate all those internal mechanisms triggered by danger and emergency. These are the reactions that push the human being towards darkness and frustration.
But next to this path, one could find a fork on the path and open a different one. This other direction leads us to reconsider our way of life from a “zero” point of greater essentiality, sustained by our values. So, what do we really need?
We need mental lucidity, we need a gradual detachment from anxiety and confusion. We must not accept discouragement, fear of the future, fear of loneliness, fear that it will all end. We must not accept that our mind and heart slide, without any resistance, towards low and dark regions, towards invisible and uncontrollable enemies. We reject these states because we know very well where they lead us to, we know it because we are experiencing it these very days. They only diminish our energy and our ability to react. What do we appeal to then? What do we hold on to? What is the deepest need?
Something unexpected may arise as a response. Something that leads us back to a human essence common to us all. A deep centre that seems not to exist, but that we can find, that supports us and has always supported humanity in difficult times. It is something intangible that hides behind the noises of our mind. Perhaps the simple fact of stopping for a few minutes in our interiority is enough to interrupt certain negative tendencies. It doesn’t matter how the human being has called this inner depth, this intangible centre, this unimaginable force of which we have only rarely been aware of its existence. We ask that the hope of a new way of life inspires and accompanies us during this crisis. We ask for strength, peace, lucidity.
Can we learn anything from this crisis? Of course, but this depends on us and us alone. It will depend on how we live this moment and how we continue our way of life after this crisis. We must no longer passively accept such a violent system, but we must take on the task of putting the human being at the centre and start mobilising to make this happen. It will depend on how we give weight to all the positive and humanist forces that are currently showing their solidarity and love for humanity as a whole.
Let us recover the deep contact with the unfathomable beauty and strength within us and in the Universe and reconsider our existential, political, cultural, economic and social position within such an inhuman system. A power that shows no interest in human beings, a power that with its selfishness of wanting everything for itself, devastate everything else. Finally, we could recognize that much of what we fear to lose, much of what we lack and anguish, that the daily mechanicity now suspended by the crisis, is not necessary to live a life full of meaning, happy and in solidarity with our fellow travelers.
Simone Casu, Paola Giordana Di Nardo, Emanuela Widmar
Translation Pressenza London
