2023-06-26 09:41:59
To live, to hope to be born entirely, is what is sketched out in each of us and asks for full fulfilment: for this we use the metaphor of the call or vocation, life challenges us, to answer our task. But what exactly does life ask of us? While an animal guided by its instinct, an infallible compass for coming into the world, in the case of humans the instinct is poor: to come into the world we need to gain experience. But today the world comes to us through screens, and so exploration and experience are somehow represented rather than present. This loss of reality, which has its extremes in the news stories of recent times, is not painless: if I don’t touch the world and am not touched by it, but I entertain myself with its images, I will not feel called by anything and will remain without destiny, the way of coming to each one’s unique and original world. For this reason, for the holidays, we educators could invent some exercise of destiny, training to come into the world, that is, allow life to call us to be born more. This is what holidays are for, to refine the work you do at home and at school, and to find an answer to the question: Why did you come into the world?. Every possible subsequent incarnation then depends on the answer: existential, relational, professional. The so-called holiday homework should be ways of facilitating the encounter between us and the world. As?
Time is the flesh we have at our disposal to be fully born, to complete what we can only be and do, and summer offers us a lot. Estate comes from a root that indicates burning, which I would like to translate here in terms of inner ardor: focus and find courage. For example, it is not enough to give books to read, in fact reading as experienced today, however much it may be of canonical books, does not lead to assimilation to the book (becoming similar to what one reads), but to assimilating the book (making it similar to : the expression I devoured it betrays this consumerist relationship. In order to become an experience of the world (coming into the world, meeting it risking) reading requires another relationship with the page, not only passive but active and creative. This doesn’t mean assigning the fateful review to be presented at the beginning of the year, but for example asking to read with a pencil in hand to underline everything that is striking and copy it in a diary, adding to those words the reason why they touched us and that thanks to them was born within us. Experiencing the world through a book, not devouring it, but actively responding to its calls, letting itself be bitten by it, feeling its wound. For this reason, at the beginning of the summer period I always ask my students to get a pocket diary, in which to record (the cell phone is not valid) every encounter with reality that they will have, painful or joyful, that is, every time they feel called, to stop that hint of destiny on the page. The world never changes, in case it is we who are deaf and in fact the adjective absurd comes from deaf, what life becomes when it lacks meaning, and therefore lacks birth: the word death is not opposed to life, but to birth, in order not to die we must continue to be born. Writing calls a way to come to light. Another exercise of destiny that I suggest (through suitable books) is meditation, a millenary practice that has nurtured the best of all the cultures of the world and allows us to draw on the two sources on which our destiny depends: breath and desire. The first, the principle of animation, allows inspiration to occur, a gift that life continually gives if we train ourselves to receive: who is inspired animated (from the Greek anemos, wind, breath). The second principle of action that the pagan world called destiny and the Christian vocation, the creative drive (projects) and erotic (good relationships) of which each of us guardians. Meditate every day for at least ten minutes (which will ever be taken away from a social media?), the best way to allow inspiration and vocation to happen, primary sources of that joy that truly makes you rest. Doing nothing is much more tiring, because what rests is the meaning of things: the more they have, the more we rest, even if they are demanding. When we lack breath or desire, we are breathing and desiring second hand, we lose joy and go looking for it where it is not. Meditating, which for some people pray immediately (Augustine said in fact that praying trains desire), allows us the presence of the present, the true rest of the mind and body, the overflowing fullness of the instant. Much of our unhappiness stems from an inability to be in the present. It has been calculated that we spend almost half of our time thinking about what is not happening, with a very high cost in terms of anxiety and confusion: instead of experiencing the world we fight with ghosts. The lack of presence of and in the present prevents the encounter between what is given to me and what I am able to receive, the hospitality of everyday life, without which we always feel out of place, in exile. Summer is not the time for books, the sea, the mountains, but the time to gain experience through books, the sea, the mountains: a melee that becomes an encounter and a call. If the boys return from vacation with two or three questions deeply rooted in their flesh and some hint of an answer about their coming into the world, then they will have rested, otherwise they will be dead tired, because doing nothing (meaningful) assimilating nothing. The poet Wislawa Szymborska apologizes for her Inattention on an ordinary day: I was like a nail driven too far into/ the surface in the wall/… which lasted a good 24 hours./ 1440 minutes of occasions./ 86,400 seconds in vision./ The savoir -vivre cosmico,/ although it is silent about us,/ nevertheless it demands something from us:/ a little attention. Just one day, let alone a whole summer.
June 26, 2023, 06:42 – edit June 26, 2023 | 06:42
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