What If We Had Allies?
Simone Riva - When it rains in the morning, the day takes a different turn. You have to factor in delays, inconvenience, humidity, appropriate clothing -- and a certain melancholy. Already the melancholy. While other things can be remedied, this unpredictable friend-exactly like rain-demands to be watched, not least because it knows how to get noticed.
It first kindles a significant impatience, which leads to enjoying every moment spent indoors before going out, only to give way to either a resigned restart or a curious readiness in the face of a different day.
It all depends on how we are willing to begin, on how we have learned to begin, on how we have already happened to begin by looking this strange ally in the face, who comes to inconvenience our predictability.
Alda Merini's genius uniquely described this whirlwind of thoughts in front of the rain in her poem “I listened to the rain”: “I listened to the rain / wondering at the silence / what fragile ardor / syllable and die. / Infinity stretched / golds and shreds of red / scenting the stones / of distant streets. / I was inhabited by dreams / smelling of moss / when the rushing river / mussed up the ocean. / I listened to the rain / wondering at the silence / how many ribbons of roads / knotted the heart. / And the rain wept / drying in the wind / over sloping roofs / of desolate villages.” Rain seems to converse with silence.
What our useless and always the same words need, our worries sometimes against ghosts that do not exist, our initiatives that do not move anyone's innermost being... silence.
And then there are the ribbons of roads that knot the heart, and how many there are! In front of this tangle God has placed another sentinel to keep us awake: sadness. Another genius, Fr. Luigi Giussani, who described it in these terms, intuits this: “Sadness is an inevitable and significant note of life, because in life, in every moment of it you have the perception of something that you still lack; sadness is a suffered absence [... ] is the condition that God has placed in the heart of human existence, so that man never quietly deludes himself that what he has will be enough for him [...] it is an integral part, not of the nature of man's destiny, but of man's existence, that is, of the path to destiny, and it is present at every step.
The more beautiful this step is for you, the more enchanting it is for you, the more it is yours, the more you understand that you are missing what you are most waiting for” (Luigi Giussani, ‘Can One Live Like This?’, Rizzoli, Milan 2007, p. 338).
Melancholy and sadness, obnoxious presences for many, tenacious allies for a few, who have no intention of letting life pass them by as if nothing were happening. Allies for all who do not pretend to be okay, who do not build false relationships, who do not shy away from challenges to spare themselves the sacrifice of being there in one piece.
So in the morning, come rain or shine, we can always start again from the silence that comes from the awe that these great allies are rooting for us.
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The author has not revised the text and its translations.
