My roots

“Trees pity men because they have no roots; I'm just passing through. " This line by Pascale Lemaître recalls a passage from the Little Prince and, as often, with the appearance of a humorous phrase said lightly, it contains a great reason for reflection. Perhaps even more than a century ago today, the lack of roots for men is a cause for concern, even though it is an increasingly widespread thing. The trees pity men, because thanks to their roots that go deep, they can face the variations of the weather, the violence of the wind and reign over a territory, limited, but in which their presence not only stands out, but influences and gives a face characterized by their existence. If they are evergreens they give life to winter by removing its dead aspect, if they are deciduous they color and characterize the environment with the splendor and wonder of the variation of their foliage; with their roots and their leaves they give life to the soil, with their breath oxygen to the environment. So we can ask ourselves: what should we learn from trees? The ecological mentality leads us to take into account their presence and their need for our psychological and physical balance. But with our little phrase we can ask ourselves about their philosophical teaching.

"The men? There are, I think six or seven. I caught a glimpse of them some time ago. But you never know where to find them. The wind carries them. They lack roots and this embarrasses them very much »says the flower in the desert to the Little Prince. Having no roots, I am not talking about the physical ones, means that there is neither spiritual nor emotional nor psychological stability. You risk not knowing who you are or what you want or how you can love. And this becomes a deep wound that heals superficially with various types of plasters, but that makes people suffer "inside", because it causes bad loneliness: not the one that allows us to find ourselves and grow in humanity, but the one that isolates and suffocates in bitterness and sadness. Some wounds leave no visible traces, but remain a continuous source of infection and malaise

Man is made for relationships, not only the horizontal ones of friendship and solidarity, which are very beautiful and necessary, but also the vertical ones, that is, with what is our past and which has constituted us as we are, and the preparation of what will follow in the future, relationships whereby we do not die wrapped and suffocated in a bubble in which we are alone in existing. These roots, memories or accomplished works may be painful for what we have experienced, or disturbing for a vision of the future covered with dark clouds, but they remain necessary for us to be who we are and not be carried away by the wind. "There are six or seven of them" says the flower, while instead there are billions: if they don't know how to stop to contemplate a flower, small, in the desert, if they don't know how to leave an imprint of their passage, they are as if they didn't exist. The roots are used to bind us to the earth and nourish ourselves with life: we are not without a past and we will not be without a future. To pass without being there is embarrassing, the flower would say and it is to be timeless, a fleeting memory of a past time that you cannot remember.

The joy of finding old photos of forgotten moments makes us aware that we need to remember our roots, not only the moments, the sensations, but above all the people: each in fact in some way shaped us. However, it is not just a question of having roots, it is also necessary to let them sink into good soil, in which they are not carried away by the wind, do not dry up due to neglect and are not suffocated by useless things.

Cesare Falletti

NP Ottobre 2021