If we cling too tightly to safety, to daily habit, shutting ourselves off from the world, we wake up one day to find we are no longer living. Life needs more than security. It needs adventure, risk, novelty, movement, openness to others. Too many obstacles—sometimes enormous ones—have blocked the joyful flow of life. Our old strength has drained away. We feel exhausted, incapable of moving forward. We drag our lives and the lives of those we love along narrow, monotonous streets, stripped of sunlight. We drowse through the routine of every day, apathetic and disillusioned, hurt by our failures, discouraged by the lack of energy we see around us. We sit down. We lie down. And those beside us, waiting for that spark of life they need so desperately, look at us in confusion, fall silent, slip into a kind of autumn sleep.
How many times have I found myself in that drowsy interior state. I justified it often as the need for well-deserved rest: enough, that's enough. Why bother to encourage, to organize, to revive, to stir up change? Why does it always fall to me? Let the others think about it for a while.
As I settle in to rest, faces begin to appear at the window I have carefully closed. My dearest friends, one by one: those who set out each morning, year after year, to their day center; those confined to their small rooms or motionless in wheelchairs; those who have always been somehow tolerated; those searching for friendship and finding none; those exhausted by being a burden; those whose mothers and fathers have given their whole lives, but...
I see in their eyes a goodness and loyalty that will never falter toward me. Those eyes seem to tell me they understand my weariness. They don't hold it against me. They wait in silence, as always.
With effort I rise from the chair. I push open the window with a sigh: spring has turned toward summer. The blooming rhododendrons, the first shining leaves of the pomegranate, call to me to shake off the torpor and apathy that cling to me like a weight. Summer is coming: it is time to prepare, to invent, to change. My friends are waiting. Their gaze, their hands, call for life, hope, joy.
Wait for me, I'm coming!
— Mariangela Bertolini, 1998
===FINE===