Italian
We have just recently overcome a sudden storm of wind and hail. Fields and gardens have been slapped by gusts of accelerated wind that have stripped the plants of their leaves and knocked down fruits and flowers, visibly compromising the harvests and earnings of an entire season. But while farmers are rightly concerned about what nature does, nature itself does not care at all what farmers think. Indeed, as paradoxical or even cruel as it may sound to those who live off the land, this slap was necessary.
The arrival of spring this year had been explosive, almost overwhelming. The plants were laden with leaves, flowers, and fruits with such rapid, disruptive, and accelerated growth that had not been seen in recent memory. Life, with this overflowing hyper-vitalism, needed to be calmed down in some way, brought back within sustainable limits. Photosynthesis had to return to its usual constancy, to that slow and wise rhythm that ensures longevity. Nature’s slap to life, therefore, has done good: it has, in its own way, set things right.
Some time ago, driven by my curiosity, an old gardener answered me with disarming clarity: “Plants take the direction and shape that we want.” Plants are not at all concerned with the external, aesthetic, or geometric form that we impose on them; they are solely interested in life. The plant rebels and suffers not because of the geometric shape itself, but when we exaggerate in the artificial vitality and the excessive productivity that we demand from it.
Nature does not follow any pre-established order, nor does it take orders from anyone. It does its work with the absolute, magnificent imprecision that characterizes it. It is not governed by the indicative mode of absolute certainty; rather, it is the conditional that defines it intrinsically. It is not, but it could be. This is wonderfully taught to us by modern quantum physics through the concept of entanglement — a term that literally means intertwining, but which beneath the surface also hides the nuance of trickery, sleight of hand, and the underlying unpredictability that governs matter. But also interaction, two bodies at infinite distance communicate with each other!
On the other hand, our very mind operates along two parallel and opposing tracks: the algorithm, which expresses itself as a linear, rigid, and static process, and emotional resonance, which is, on the contrary, a random, fluctuating, and profoundly dynamic process. One structurally compensates for the other. And both come into play simultaneously in our daily experience, without providing any possibility of predicting the final outcome. We can behave according to the strictest logic or move based on instinctive, empathetic, or even unlikable choices. Everything, in the universe as in the human soul, occurs according to oscillations, frequencies, and an absolute absence of a predefined direction.
It has been just a few decades since watermelon cost only two lire per kilo, and today the world appears to us to be enormously changed, transfigured. Life seems to have become more difficult, definitely more expensive, and unnecessarily complicated. But we can do nothing but resign ourselves to this extraordinary, mysterious, and chaotic functioning of things. We must accept the slap of nature because it does us good. If two bodies distant in infinite time communicate with each other, how can we not think of our proximity, confined within the limits of our small sphere that is the world? Therefore, in the universe of possible interactions, there is one certainty, proven by physics at least for now: algorithm and emotional resonance mark our existential space-time. From the interactions of matter, we must deduce that our happiness is only such if it is shared.
