The Secret
Alessandro D’Avenia - Life outside sucks. All the "rush, all of it, in a perpetual race; a sack full of questions and no answers, they demand so much of you, but you can't demand anything from anyone," so writes me, a student with whom I had exchanged a few lines in high school, when she had slipped into the anorexia that is now coming back to threaten her: "I've started to lose the weight I've regained, I've isolated myself from my friends, I lock myself in the house to study and I don't want to see anyone. All the doctors who follow me believe that the disease is coming back.
I refuse to believe it. What am I doing? I'm just pandering to the world that wants you to be perfect, thin, size 32, graduate with a 110 cum laude, cool, with a stable, permanent job, a family, and children, itself perfect.
Is life outside, the world outside, really that bad. What is the secret of life?
Together we can find the answer to your pain. In fact, it is becoming more and more clear to me that your body is crying out the wound that we all carry, but which is now more inflamed, the wound of origin: not feeling wanted enough, not feeling like a child, and therefore not rejoicing in being born.
How can we heal this wound of the primary trust in life, the filial trust?
I do not want to console you, but to invite a rebellion against this mixture of nihilism, individualism, and consumerism that Pasolini identified half a century ago as the new fascism: the commercialization of everything eliminates the sacred from life, that is, what is inviolable or inaccessible, reducing man to a machine.
It reduces man to a machine of production and consumption, isolated and always unsatisfied.
The rebellion against this death in life, you and others, are already doing it implicitly, embodying a quest for absolute control or in the absolute loss of control: anorexia and bulimia are extremes of that emptiness that arises from the fact that we know nothing about our origins, except the accounts given to us by others.
An original voice that answers the question: was I wanted? A voice whose meaning I understood better some time ago when I participated in a project to purchase special incubators that simulate the mother's voice for premature babies, which is essential during pregnancy.
Terrence Malick summed it up poetically in his movie, "Tree of Life," when one of the children in the main family asks his mother, "Tell us stories from before when we can remember. Origin hunger: the desire to be the fruit of a meaningful, intentional, expected story.
Those who do not feel enough are not wanted enough and end up blaming themselves or others for being there. For if to exist it is enough to be created, to live it is necessary to feel wanted. This hunger for origin is common to all of us, as I have witnessed in some cases of adopted children who, although much loved by their adoptive parents, go in search, more or less confused, of those who brought them into the world.
Biology is not enough to be a child if it does not become a biography: being a child and being able to speak of oneself as a child are not the same thing. Now, however, this implicit rebellion of bodies must become explicit, and therefore political, in order to be the sprout of another civilization.
What prevents us from feeling like children? What are the daily experiences necessary for a filiation that is not subject to performance or merit?
What are the forms of belonging that make one feel wanted in the most stable way possible?
In school, I see maturing children who feel wanted by parents and teachers. By "wanted," I don't mean protected to the point of being repressed but taken seriously (recognized and proven) in their originality: there is no originality without the discovery and care of the origin.
For this reason, there is a phrase of Christ's that seems to me, whether I am a believer or not, to shed light on everyday life: "He who sees the Son sees the Father", where the word "Father", as the word most familiar to his hearers, must be understood as that which protects and sustains life.
For him, then, being a son is the image of the divine, which is not perfection, immortality, or omnipotence, but being begotten and sustained in life, that is, experiencing here and now a love that wants me to exist, even in moments of crisis. This reminds us, believers, or not, that we are all children, but we experience it at different depths.
A body that feels wanted from the womb develops a strong immune system and the energy to grow.
A psyche that knows it is wanted is more protected from fear, and depression, from the belief that it must earn its place in the world, from the suspicion that it is useless or only useful under certain conditions. A mind that feels wanted is ready to love unconditionally because it feels loved unconditionally. When the three dimensions of the human being - body, psyche, and spirit - are "finalized," the human being flourishing, otherwise we beg for origin, regeneration, and the point of birth, to be wanted.
Where there is filial emptiness, there is the (re)pressure to originate, to generate oneself, to be loved, which in today's version is the duty to be perfect, to meet expectations and standards of success. But being perfect is inhumane precisely because it is the opposite of being a child, that is, being given to ourselves, an original, originating experience on which our view of the world depends. This is true not only of childhood and adolescence but of all of life, as the passage in the Odyssey that I love most tells us.
In the middle of the poem, Odysseus travels to Hades, among the dead, where he meets his mother, who has failed him in his absence: at the symbolic center of the journey of life, that is, always, every human being must confront the wound of origin. But it is precisely the mother who, after showing him the fate of the dead, regenerates him and invites him to return to the light soon to tell his bride all that has happened to him: she entrusts him to a new birth, a new origin, a new wanted being.
In fact, it is only when he tells his Odyssey to Penelope at the end of the poem that Odysseus can call himself "returned". Indeed, life is always relative (in relation: one owes it to another) and not absolute (literally: loose, unattached); indeed, it is precisely the presence of origin that impels one to cherish and create (only those who are heirs can then develop inheritance) and to weave bonds that are not exclusively dictated by usefulness or merit.
These are the ties that you need.
Rebel against isolation, go outside, touch a rose for one minute, pet a cat for five, hug someone for ten... it is enough to feel that at the bottom of life, there is a good origin and that there is nothing, even the smallest thing, that is not sacred, like the fireflies whose sudden disappearance due to pollution Pasolini lamented in an article that appeared in this newspaper in February 1975, so much so that today, if we happen to see one, we cry out for a miracle. I will never forget a meadow full of fireflies that I saw in the summer, one of those moments when I felt like a child dreaming, wanted, loved. In your condition, it is difficult to let yourself be loved, but you try to take the risk.
You cannot do it alone. Ask for help, lower your defenses, and listen to the voice of life. Then you will hear its secret: to become a child.
Alessandro's column D'Avenia appears every Monday in the Italian daily newspaper Il Corriere della Sera. Through the characters we loved or hated in school, the writer awakens in us a possible art of living every day with enthusiasm.
This translation, provided by Epochalchange for educational and meaningful purposes, has not been revised by the author or editor. It is intended for personal use only and not for commercial gain. Download here.
