A few days ago, the Festa Major began in Blanes, a beautiful town on the Catalan Costa Brava, on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. As has become a tradition, every night of the festival, fireworks are set off in the evening.
These fireworks are directed from a place in the sea, very close to the beach, so that the 2km of beach are filled with thousands of people enjoying the spectacle, many from the village itself but also from nearby towns, as well as the usual summer tourists.
Among those thousands of people who gather, we are sure to find some of progressive thinking, and others of conservative thinking. There will also be Spaniards, from other parts of Europe and other continents. There will be women, men, young, old, heterosexuals, homosexuals, trans or non-binary people, and a very long etcetera with all the human variety we can think of.
The extraordinary thing is that no one is there to argue about their differences. They are all there to enjoy a spectacle that is basically emotional. To enjoy a kind of coloured bombs exploding in the sky, producing beautiful symbols accompanied by a solar plexus-shaking roar. At each explosion you hear the “aaah…!” and the “ooooh…!”. The children enjoy it very much, as do their mothers and fathers or any other individual present. All those thousands of people are (we are) on the beach, quite close together, with their eyes on the sky and their emotions open to receive the pleasure of a fireworks that combine beauty, art, technology, and that in a way help us to connect with something higher.
In this situation, I ask myself: why can’t we always live like this, enjoying what excites us in common, putting aside our differences, or giving them perspective, understanding that although we see things differently (as is inevitable) there is something that unites us above all else, and that is our feeling for the beautiful, our feeling of communion, of brotherhood?
If this quasi-mystical situation is possible, it means that everything is possible, that there is nothing that cannot be achieved. That ultimately all human beings share a destiny, and that this destiny is beyond the immediate and the individual.
