Von meiner italienischen Kollegin:
Translated from Italian, written by Psychologist (F. Morelli)
"I believe that the cosmos has its own way of balancing things and its laws when they are altered.
"The moment we're living in, full of anomalies and paradoxes, makes one think...
At a time when climate change caused by environmental disasters has reached worrying levels, China first and foremost, and many countries afterwards, are forced to freeze; the economy collapses, but pollution drops considerably. The air improves; you use the mask, but you breathe...
In a historical moment in which certain discriminatory ideologies and policies, with strong references to a miserable past, are being reactivated all over the world, a virus arrives that makes us experience that, in an instant, we can become the discriminated, the segregated, those stuck at the frontier, those who carry diseases. Even if we are not to blame. Even if we are white, Westerners and traveling in business class.
In a society based on productivity and consumption, in which we all run 14 hours a day behind the unknown, without Saturdays or Sundays, with no more reds on the calendar, from one moment to the next, comes the stop.
Stop, at home, days and days. To reckon with a time whose value we have lost, if it is not measurable in compensation, in money. Do we still know what to do with it?
In a phase in which the growth of one's children is, by necessity, often delegated to other figures and institutions, the virus closes schools and forces them to find alternative solutions, to put mothers and fathers back together with their children. It forces us to start a new family.
In a dimension where relationships, communication, sociality are played mainly in the "non-space" of the virtual, social network, giving us the illusion of closeness, the virus takes away the real closeness: no touching, no kissing, no hugging, at a distance, in the cold of non-contact. How much have we taken these gestures and their meaning for granted?
In a social phase in which thinking about one's own garden has become the rule, the virus sends us a clear message: the only way out of it is reciprocity, a sense of belonging, community, the feeling of being part of something bigger to take care of and that can take care of us. The shared responsibility, the feeling that the fate not only of you but of everyone around you depends on your actions. And that you depend on them.
So, if we stop doing witch hunts, wondering whose fault it is or why all this happened, but wondering what we can learn from this, I think we all have a lot to think about and commit ourselves to.
Because with the cosmos and its laws, obviously, we owe a debt of gratitude.
The virus is explaining it to us, at great cost."
