There Where an Other Awaits Us
Simone Riva - What an effect to see them, after all these years, on the eve of the final exam. Lessons, questions, exams, interviews -- now everything gives way to them, just them. This is how we saw them at the end-of-year dinner. Happy, focused, because now it's their turn.
It is like getting your driver's license: at a certain point, the explanations and recommendations fall silent as you wait for the foot to press the clutch pedal for the first time and the right hand to engage the gear. You are needed to get something moving.
And how nice it is to see their eagerness to get going. Not like those who always miss the best of life because they prefer to comment on it. At the end of the meal, they read a letter addressed to us teachers, in which they collected the reasons why they wanted to thank us. Funny, nice, true.
My turn came: "Thank you for being the only one who could make us open up, we will always carry you in our hearts." Immediately I thought: but who opened what? The song "All this nothing - the eyes" by Marracash came to mind:
"We wish for what we see / And sometimes we just wish to be seen / We think that what we need is outside of us / While what we really need is invisible / Throw your thoughts out or they will end up killing you. What has happened over the years to make me write the almost impossible as a thank you? As I watched them grow up, I couldn't help but wonder what it was like to grow up with them. We all came to terms with this "need to be seen" without hiding behind roles.
We faced the most pressing questions head-on with my provocations and their "What's it like for you, teacher?"
No one backed down, and so we found ourselves wide open to say that we had opened up. God knows how beautiful it is to see each other and ourselves blossom with this freedom. Often school runs the risk of being a filler, like so many things we do in life to take our minds off thinking.
In the same song, Marracash expresses this with a brilliant phrase:
"I fill my time and I don't fill the emptiness." But this emptiness has a voice that knows how to be heard.
It does not need words, for it speaks with our eyes, with our face, and with the intrepid rhythm of our heartbeat. How many times have I entered a classroom and in the first few moments I was able to sense the mood of the day, the efforts, the enthusiasm, the annoyance, the questions, the fears, the disappointments, the desire to continue.
But always with the desire to be seen. A desire with which we cannot compromise.
Giacomo Leopardi captured this boundless tension in black and white:
"And when I look up at the sky, where the stars are burning; / I say to myself, thinking: / Why so many faces? / What is the infinite air doing, and this deep / infinite serenity? what does this / immense loneliness mean? and what am I?"
("Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia"). We are more familiar with the infinite and the immense than with nothingness, and the emptiness we often feel reminds us of this.
Perhaps the secret of a full life lies here:
Not to lose the taste for being with oneself. There is another waiting for us, and the great opening becomes possible.
Published on Il Giornale di Monza. Unrevised translation by the author. Download.
