Observe
Publish date 14-10-2024
If there is one thing that works well as a refuge from life, along with a few other things, it is definitely spending a few hours at the seaside every now and then. I am not saying to have a house by the sea to go there on weekends, that is something else and works less well. Not even living by the sea, but going there every now and then, after the scarcity of not being able to go for a certain period.
If you have ever taken a dip at dawn, before the world wakes up, then you know what I am talking about. Here is something similar, another refuge for the soul is observing children.
I mean not only children, but the children who inhabit the world.
Now I would like to focus on the verb osservare which means to look carefully, to examine, to scrutinize. It comes from the Latin ob-servare meaning to guard.
A look with the possibility of guarding, it seems like a beautiful thing to me. If you then learn to look at children with a certain attention, with a clean look, then you feel a sense of return of the look.
You realize that there is something that comes from far away. It is a sensation similar to that which you can experience looking at the stars in the desert.
I have tried it and I assure you that it is dizzying. To recap: the sea, the stars, the children.
I think I am not too wrong if I venture that the dizziness comes from the fact that they are three things from which we all come.
Places of pristine sublime beauty. You observe them and they observe you and, in that space between you and them, there is energy, positive vibrations, I would venture the word "love".
You can do this thing a thousand times and it will still seem like the first time.
It's an exercise that should be prescribed to adults: "When it seems to you that there is no solution, you look at a child, the stars or the sea."
It's a way to scrape away the encrustations, the rust, clean the heart, recover the original.
It's trying to see again, with a virgin gaze, it's dizzying, I've already said.
A piece of advice: it would be better to be able to look at everything as closely as possible. The sea swimming in it, children directly in the eyes. I realize that with the stars it becomes more complicated, unless you are in the desert and there really even the stars seem closer.
Roberto Cristaudo
NP June / July 2024