Every day is a new day
A few weeks ago, I was standing in front of a primary school at afternoon dismissal time. When the doors opened, I saw whole classes of children leaving with their heads bowed, sad, angry, with tears in their eyes. I asked for an explanation and was told it was ‘Remembrance Day’. The proud teachers then began to describe to the parents present their efforts to recount and show images of some past atrocities. I reflected on the follies we are capable of.
On this wonderful spring day, I learned instead that in Italy they have chosen to dedicate 18 March to the victims of covid, so as to ensure a new tear to the next generation, to mark a scar in their hearts. Before support for this initiative spreads, it is worth saying something about it.
Because what politicians ignore, and what many of the army of educators choose not to see, is that a day dedicated to the victims of something easily turns into a day dedicated to anger, frustration, fear. It is a time dedicated to pain, illness, cruelty, powerlessness and this never educates to renewal, to different choices, but to guilt, to fear of what could still happen.
There are no victims, someone had to tell you sooner or later. What a lack of empathy, of compassion, of respect in considering someone a victim. No, there are no victims, you have the right not to be considered as such, because whatever happens to you, you will certainly have done your best to live until the end, to breathe, to love, to be you until the last moments of this experience on Earth. No event will ever have the power to deprive you of being a protagonist, an important part of our history.
If we want to grow, we must learn to let go of the past, because all our resistance always stems from the past. We keep judging the present by referring to the past, but the past is no more, it can become totally irrelevant, and yet we let it interfere. We keep judging by that, saying, “This is right and that is wrong,” and all these ideas of right and wrong, all these energies, come 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 who you are better than you were yesterday, and then drop it completely, you will be surprised: most of the suffering will disappear.
We do not need a way of the cross in our hearts, days dedicated to fatigue, to death, to suffering: we rather need the feast of desire, the day of passion, of freedom and not liberation, of love without lovers, of the joy of learning to be authentic, happy, alone and inseparably together.
Because every day is a new day, and it is completely yours, at your service, it comes for you: don’t devote it to anything other than living it intensely.
A festive embrace
