Every day is a new day.

Today, I found myself in front of an elementary school during the afternoon dismissal. When the doors opened, I saw entire classes of children exiting with bowed heads, sad, angry, with tears in their eyes. I asked for explanations, and I was told it was an early commemoration of the ‘Day of Remembrance.’ The proud teachers then began describing to the parents present their dedicated effort to narrate and show images of past atrocities. I reflected on the madness we are capable of.

Because what politicians ignore, and much of the army of educators chooses not to see, is that a day dedicated to victims easily turns into a day of anger, frustration, and fear. It becomes a time dedicated to pain, illness, cruelty, helplessness, and this never educates towards renewal, towards different choices, but towards guilt, towards the fear of what might still happen.

If we want to grow, we must learn to let go of the past because all our resistance always comes from the past. We continue to judge the present by referring to the past, but the past is no more; it can become entirely irrelevant, yet we let it interfere. We continue to judge based on that, to say, “This is right and that is wrong,” and all these ideas of right and wrong, all these energies, derive from something that is dead. Your cadaverous past weighs on you to the point that it prevents you from moving. Learn from it to be better today than yesterday, and then let it fall away completely; you will be surprised: most of the suffering will disappear.

We don’t need a Via Crucis in our hearts, days dedicated to effort, death, suffering: we rather need the festival of desire, the day of passion, of freedom and not liberation, of love without lovers, the joy of learning to be authentic, happy, alone, and inseparably together.

Because every day is a new day, and it is entirely yours, at your service, coming for you: do not dedicate it to anything other than living it intensely.

A festive embrace.