What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
Do you feel the same? You pass a bus stop and think: Why are they all still masked? You notice these people now, like people without masks in the Corona period. A few more weeks – then the last tormentors will have left your face. What have you plagued us, annoyed us, made us angry!
“Have you got the mask with you?” Was the farewell greeting millions of parents gave their children when they left the house. Not: “Bye, I love you.”
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
How nice that the sweet air of freedom is blowing around our noses again! How nice to see what someone’s face looks like again. I feel a new attitude towards life in the middle of winter, and I think millions of people feel the same way.
The piece of fabric stood and stands for protection against the uncanny disease that can attack anyone. “You can’t get me, Covid,” many thought when they put on the FFP mask. FFP – only surgeons and pharmacists knew this abbreviation. Suddenly millions of Germans were mouth and nose mask specialists.
It’s great that from February 2nd we’ll be able to look each other in the face again, wherever we are – also on buses and in the ICE. Prof. Peter Waischburger, Emeritus Professor of Psychology from Berlin, says: “It starts with a little smile. Evolution has given us the ability to communicate friendly feelings through facial expressions.”
Isn’t this sentence like a request to us: Show the other person that you like him or her. It’s easy – smile!
* Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittel-shop.de.