Italian
There comes a moment in each of our lives when we look around and discover that the landscape has become familiar without ever having truly chosen it. It is the surprise of the “here and now”: a point on the map that does not coincide with that of the birth certificate, but which has become, due to a sum of inertia and necessity, the only possible place.
The Hamletian doubt of to be or not to be does not lie in the dynamic force of being in contrast to the darkness and inertia of non-being. To be there and nothing more, that is the answer, however it may be. We find ourselves spending our brief existence between duties and desires, both alien to us and to what we find ourselves doing, perhaps in the wrong place, yet a place that has become safe for us and that we do not want to abandon for any reason.
Only a few fortunate ones get to choose where to be buried. But they also know — or need to be reminded — that it will never be forever.
We often tell ourselves the fairy tale of conscious choice. We say we have seized an irresistible opportunity, that we have followed a career or a calling. But, looking closely at the folds of memory, many of us are like those conscripted soldiers who were once sent to the other side of the peninsula with a postcard in their pocket. An order, a journey, a chance meeting under a bell tower never seen before, and the trajectory of a life changes forever.
Human beings, despite having legs, possess a surprisingly similar nature to that of plants. Like a seed carried by the winds of chance, we fall onto unknown soil. Initially, we feel like strangers, almost prisoners of a geography that does not belong to us. Then, however, the grafting occurs: a friendship, first love, the duty of service, the birth of a family branch that was not foreseen in the original design.
Roots are not an act of will; they are the result of habit that becomes destiny. One forces oneself to stay because there is nowhere else to go, and once the fiber is intertwined with the earth, the tearing becomes unthinkable.
But there is an even deeper aspect to this forced rooting. In a world that runs, that fragments, that sees its centers of power — our ideal “Capitols” — occupied by new and indecipherable barbarities, the place of uprooting paradoxically becomes the last refuge. We find ourselves saying, with a hint of stoic pride: “Here we will be just fine!”. It is not the joy of someone who has found paradise, but the satisfaction of someone who has built a trench of normality in the midst of the unknown.
It is the choice to wait for the storm to pass, cultivating one’s own garden away from the noise of conquerors, waiting for a rescue that may never come, but which is no longer necessary.
To the question “where do you come from?”, the most honest answer is: “I don’t know”. It doesn’t matter the starting point, but the conscious ability to have transformed chance into fact. Like the saints who become so, without having intended it.
We are all, in the end, exiles who have learned to call “home” the land where the wind has left us. And in this fidelity to the present place, in this patient and silent resistance, lies the only true possibility of reclaiming what time and history have taken from us.
Thus, “We will be aware of our holiness,” as in the verses of Dylan Thomas, “Then we will rise on wide wings and enter the air…”.
