"Me too!"

Publish date 12-11-2022

by Matteo Spicuglia

Once upon a time there was a country where everyone felt or looked perfect.
All attached to their roles, their skills, the image they gave to the outside world.
In that country lived great politicians with a solution for everything, long-time industrialists focused on the numbers of production, men and women of culture and their maximum systems on the meaning of life. Then, the world of professions, somewhat closed and self-referential circles. And again, fathers and mothers of families pigeonholed into apparently granite choices, educators happy to dispense advice, figures of all kinds committed to giving their best in society. In that country there also lived a young man who, the more he grew up and looked around, the more he felt inadequate. He experienced the limit of himself and did not understand it. He perceived himself to be changeable, contradictory, made up of chiaroscuro.
He had big dreams and felt he had no tools to make them come true. Above all, he was crushed by that sense of perfection that was everywhere.

When he tried to confide in the world that passed inside him he only met adults with prepackaged, unflappable answers, distant from his reality of him. One day, in a moment of difficulty, he talked about it with a peer, a friend who had lived the same experience, who shared the same sensitivity. “Maybe I have the person who can do for you.
He is a bit uncomfortable because he doesn't mince words, indeed he is a man of very few words. But he knows how to go straight to the heart. He will help you ».
The young man set out in search of that adult. He didn't have an address. He only knew that precisely because of his atypical nature he had been placed on the sidelines of the life of the country. He lived in a cabin at the foot of a mountain, far from the town. A simple, essential life, made up of silence and few encounters. Only people who were willing to really get involved came to him. Many thought they encountered the answers of life, precise indications on the choices to be made, to discover who knows what arcane. It was not like this. Even that young man soon understood.
By asking around, he managed to put the pieces together and find the house. He knocked and was greeted by the wise man. He had a strange feeling, as if he had known him forever. He immediately felt at ease. «Welcome boy, are you here too? Why did you look for me? Tell me everything. I'm here to listen to you ».
The young man opened his heart and without knowing why he was like a raging river.

He brought out all the good and the beauty of his life, the impulses of his years, the dreams, the hopes. But he didn't stop there. For the first time, he had the courage to also tell the darkness he lived through, his efforts, his contradictions, his anguish, the cold of those who experience their limits. He talked for a long time. In the end there was like a silence, broken by a single sentence of the wise man: "My boy, what you live, I have lived and I live too. Understood? Me too. But it is possible to walk, not to feel alone ». That "Me too!" it had a shattering effect on the young man's heart.
For the first time, he had met an adult capable of showing not his certainties, but his frailty. He was moved and was as if disoriented, but in an instant he understood that the path to follow in life was that: sharing, not being afraid, walking with others, giving a name to every nuance of humanity, even to the less noble ones.
The young man embraced the wise man, greeted him and thanked him. Then he returned home with the promise to do the same, to multiply the good effect of a simple "me too!": The key to all closeness.


Matteo Spicuglia
NP August / September 2022

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