SIMPLE THINGS, BETTER THAN LIFE ITSELF​

It is necessary to re-examine life with its heavy saddlebags of injustices, unnecessary violence, inequalities, scorn, abuses, desertions, but also to value its many advances and discoveries. Something similar is happening with the muddy democracy, which has been tarnished, worn out and used.

We must exercise reasonableness. We must go through centuries of thoughts with the innocence of stories, aware of the depth of traditions, assuming collective memories, myths, dreams, realities, conscious of the evanescence of each instant, of the impossibility of returning to the past, assuming the influences of the few confirmed knowledge and trying to positivize images conducive to hope, aware of an inevitable destiny.

Life is slow only in old photographs and expectations. The current of events flows, not always significant, less ideal. We must be careful with the eddies, swim and take care of our clothes. From the balcony-refuge the attentive observer is conditioned absorbed by abundance, prone to ambitions, to unbridled consumerism. Everything is much and it is nothing. Suddenly the flood stops at a tiny detail: an accomplice’s eyes, an unexpected caress, a beautiful object, a work of art, a word….. Life then acquires a nuanced appreciation. Everything of essential importance is little: eating, communicating, hygiene, health… but there are glimpses.

To remain demands to be brave, to know how to coexist with disturbances, to learn to alternate with inevitable irresolutions, nervousness and displeasure, to assume small circumstantial delights.

We live in the end of the world, which can be sensed in the loneliness of the masses, in the impenetrability of the unassumable: climate change, inequality, wars, famine, single thought… Everything happens quickly, as in a perfect dissection of the times, almost comparable to that of added anxieties: excess of information and disinformation, constructed truths, dictatorship of compulsive consumptions, collective solitudes, disinvolvement, wild capitalism, irruption of soulless funds, exposure and handling of intimate data by computers… apparently distant conflicts that invade intimacy… A puzzle of things that are superimposed on other unresolved, dragged, unwrapped, accumulated as in a sort of Diogenes syndrome. These sludges come from ancient waters, they have been soaking until they find their bottom, but they will become clay again and it will be possible to mold delicate and beautiful ceramics, which will adorn our lives again, to be chipped, to be restored with the technique of kintsugi (in Japanese gold carpentry), to fall apart… it is the cycle of evolution, a metaphor of achievements and losses.

La vida discurre por el estrecho margen de las circunstancias, de lo casual. La oportunidad se puede provocar con limitaciones, previendo que pueda ocurrir algo imprevisible que varíe todos los planes, incluso los mejor concebidos, que altere las concepciones, que destruya los prejuicios. Hay que dejar margen a la sorpresa, predisponerse a las mejoras y a los empeoramientos. Portar una sombrilla que pueda convertirse en paraguas, cerrarse de forma inmediata o utilizarse como arma contra las eventualidades.

Toda inteligencia, aún en sus mínimos atisbos, debería enfocarse hacia entendimientos o actitudes elementales: reconocerse, buscar en el interior de uno mismo las intuiciones o revelaciones, analizar la relación con las demás inteligencias, con las otras conciencias, con el mundo natural, determinar un marco de convivencia social y medioambiental, establecer mecanismos de supervivencia física suficientes, trasladar a los demás las experiencias propias, escuchar con respeto las ajenas… Hay que desrutinizar la existencia.

Solo nos queda confiar. En ocasiones, en la vida pasan cosas aparentemente mejores que la propia vida. El fango puede volverse arcilla, si lo entendemos así entonces sabremos cómo recomenzar, todos juntos. Esa es la magia.

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ALBERTO BARCIELA, periodista español, es vicepresidente de EditoRed. 

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