About three weeks ago I dedicated a column to this brutal drug, fentanyl, and a very kind reader, Agustín Hernández, commented on it on my Facebook page and said that he would love it if I usually included a few glimmers of hope in my writing I allowed myself to write an article that was full of enthusiasm “from start to finish.” The following Sunday, after a column in which I talked about Gaza (of course), another regular reader, Doña Bamba, who has a special and hilarious sense of humor and usually adds humor to my writings, declared: “Either I turn around. “pissed or lately you choose things that I can’t scrape an ounce of grace out of to soothe.” In short, it seems readers are asking me for a truce. I also demand it from the world and from life. The observations people make about your work are interesting. Many years ago, maybe 20, another reader wrote me a loving letter saying my articles weren’t bad and such and such, but I didn’t realize that I had been talking only about books for too many weeks. It shocked me because I checked what he had published and in fact almost all of the columns in the last few months were based on a book, that is, they were reflections triggered by a reading. I don’t know what was happening in my life at that time, but it couldn’t have been very good, considering that I had taken such excessive refuge in the protective haven of literature. I don’t remember the name of this clairvoyant reader either, but I still appreciate his advice, which of course I followed: I left the reading bubble and returned to the turbulent life.
At that time, of course, responsibility for this thematic monotony lay solely with me. But I fear that the many dark clouds and the bad mood in the current case are something very general. This is how many of us feel, almost all of us, with a lump of fear in our throats, longing for a break from so much resentment. This morning while I was walking my dog, I met a neighbor. She is a much older woman than me, foreign, beautiful and still athletic. “The articles of yours that I like best are the ones that deal with little things,” he told me. I was thinking about this text I’m writing and it seemed like a strange coincidence. It’s true: it’s the little things that make up life. The real thing in the tiny nests. In one of my books I said, “Happiness is minimalist.” It is simple and naked. It’s almost nothing, which is everything.” I apologize for quoting myself, but I believe that the maelstrom of great social traumas we are experiencing, the pandemic, wars, sectarianism and extremism, global warming, climate disasters and increasing violence, preventing us from appreciating the humble structure of truth, that is almost nothing so immense. Enjoy the gentle rain falling on the other side of the windows while I’m warm and protected; of the warm and loving smell of my dog when I hold him in my arms; of loved ones and friends with whom I laugh and cry; how my body responds to exercise; that my skin tingles when I listen to music; of the good and beautiful. And above all, the miracle of being fully aware of your life. Because there is joy in life.
There is a well-known sentence that I have read in books and interviews, that I have heard in front of me and that, unfortunately, I have sometimes said to myself: “I was happy then and didn’t know it.” ” It is a retrospective clarity that when you suffer a serious loss. Whenever I come across this sentence, I am amazed at how blind we are, how brutal we are, how little we know and feel about ourselves. I live with a stranger who is me. Or rather, I walk through my days hand in hand with a stranger that is me, tongue hanging out, not thinking and not breathing. It occurs to me that it might be good to do a mental exercise: imagine that a catastrophe suddenly jolts me out of my reality. An illness, your own or that of a loved one; a death; a ruin; an exile And then from this made-up edge of darkness try to appreciate all the light that is in my presence. Because now I’m happy (at least temporarily and for various reasons) and I want to know it.
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