How do you change

I have heard about the proposal to carry out a large-scale survey to assess whether there are more people who believe they have "lost" so much to the pandemic than those who claim instead of having earn, appreciate or rediscover much more. Maybe interesting data would emerge and maybe there would be some surprises… who knows! What is already certain (and does not require official surveys because it is there for all to see) is that on this topic the opinions are in fact very contrasting and sometimes opposite, testifying to the fact that more than concrete external events the modalities with which they are experienced, the glasses through which they are observed. For the series "nothing will be the same again", over the past few weeks many have been heard: from those who repeated that things that were previously "normal" (going to the cinema or to school, to the park or to a pizzeria) will never be again , to those who argued that we finally had the opportunity to appreciate the little things and daily gestures that are done in a home, to those who confessed to having had enormous difficulties in staying confined for a long time in their own home and believed they were going crazy, to those who recognized that the crisis made us discover - by removing them - that certain things were not so essential and freed us from many useless claims ... There are those who say that, thanks to the pandemic, we have rediscovered the sense of belonging to a community , the pride of being part of the same community and those who observe, on the contrary, an evident increase in mistrust and selfishness, if not even in mutual hatred and hatred. Some are distressed at having rediscovered themselves more fragile, more vulnerable, more exposed to new dangers and invisible enemies.

Others have become more aware that the world is really a small village and that a problem that arises in a place perceived as "far away" inevitably affects the rest of the globe in the blink of an eye. Some would like to take refuge behind walls, barriers and borders and praise nationalisms and localisms as possible ways of salvation. Others speak of the serious economic crisis that the pandemic has caused as the most terrible catastrophe since the war, but there are also those who consider it an opportunity to try to be a little more essential, in a serious way. In short, in this time of the Covid epidemic there are so many stimuli, reflections, considerations of all kinds that have emerged and continue to emerge every day and accompany us, so much so that it is not uncommon to experience a feeling of confusion, uncertainty, of disorientation. To try to draw a conclusion, I make my own the words of the current Bishop of Pinerolo - Msgr Derio Olivero - from the interview book Life will come and will have his eyes (Ed. San Paolo): "To understand what this time is telling us, I make a […] reference to my experience as a Covid patient. There was a moment, lasting two or three days, when I was very close to death. I felt that I was dying - and the doctors later confirmed that the risk was very high - and I perceived death as a moment in which everything, absolutely everything, evaporates. The body itself was evaporating, but the many things I did, the many projects I had in mind, the things in life were also evaporating. And in this evaporation only two things remained firm, two things that were therefore the real me, my hard core, my identity: a great trust, which as a believer I call faith in God, that is the certainty of a Presence, and the many dear faces with whom I have established relationships. I am convinced that, in this personal experience, a universal truth is contained, and that this necessitates a serious reflection on both elements".


Gabriella Delpero
NP October 2020