Hope

The compass to face another difficult year

New Year New Life! he heard himself sometimes on the occasion of the exchange of New Year's greetings. After all, everything that starts always gives the idea and the desire for change, freshness, rebirth, perhaps combined with the hope of witnessing something new.

But with the current times and the pandemic that continues its unstoppable gallop, this new year 2022 and the near future - which already worried - now frighten even more or in any case certainly do not convey a flavor, an expectation of novelty. We are suspended between a past that we know but have lost (due to the collapse of many pillars of social life and the questioning of many aspects of our former daily life) and a future that is still unknown but already fraught with contradictions and uncertainties. So, will this “newborn” 2022 see us sinking towards the abyss or will it usher in an “other” time with the possibility of successfully tackling the problems that have tormented us for months?

The question is too clear and drastic, probably neither of the two possibilities will occur. In fact, we cannot think of simply going back to the pre-covid period, trying to restart at all costs a car that has stopped, bringing it back to its starting position and turning the key on the dashboard. The social world is not a machine. Nor can we imagine changing everything by pressing the accelerator only on technological innovation (which certainly is needed, but cannot become an obsession) and on scientific knowledge (which - however extraordinary it may be - remains imperfect).

These two roads reveal man's eternal illusion of being able to eliminate all uncertainty and ambiguity from his horizon, in order to be able to keep everything under control. But reality is more complex than we think, it changes at a faster rate than we do, and it is not in our power at all. We could almost say that we live in a world that continually eludes us. And that we are part of a society "at risk", characterized by evident fragility.

This awareness was thrown at us forcefully by the "surprise" of the pandemic, which suddenly rained on our heads. In the short space of a few days, our previous existential conditions were radically upset. All this is now at the basis of the spread of many anxieties and deep fears, which oppress us adults and many of our young people: just look at some statistics to realize that the psycho-social discomfort and the real psychic suffering of our children and teenagers has reached peaks and proportions never so high in previous decades.

There is a huge sense of insecurity that grips them and sometimes paralyzes them. There are dozens of children in our cities who have not left their homes for months, have not returned to school and close themselves to any proposal for resocialization with their peers, hiding in what they consider a protective shell capable of protecting them from contact with an external world perceived as hostile and threatening. There are others who say they no longer find any incentive to take initiatives and make plans for their future, up to those who claim they no longer have any reason to want to continue facing a simple, banal day.

But there are fortunately in many other significant energies that have remained unexpressed and are waiting to be "released". It is a question of giving wings and visibility to a hope that does not coincide with that of the formula "everything will be fine" (remember?) Which appeared almost everywhere in the first weeks of the lockdown. In fact, “hope is by no means the same as optimism. It is not the belief that something will turn out well, but the certainty that that thing makes sense, regardless of how it turns out "(Václav Havel).

Gabriella Delpero

NP Gennaio 2022