Waiting for better times

Dear baby Jesus, for Christmas this year, I would just like a gift... to be able to do something, not who knows what unimaginable thing, simply something; of the "normal" kind, nothing extravagant, hugging a friend, kissing a loved one I haven't seen for a long time, spending a day of celebration with an extended family. We had almost forgotten the enormous value contained in the small gestures flooded with the craving for compulsive purchases in which the pre-holiday advertising mechanism had slowly accustomed us. Now that the end of this horrible year approaches, even television seems more cautious and subdued in its suggestions based on commercials, the Holidays, those with a capital initial, seem a distant horizon, a slow conquest to be earned day after day .

The frenetic mass rush to respond to the imperatives imposed by advertising is now a memory linked to last Christmas, the subtle mechanism has become much lighter, social redemption no longer passes through the elegant or expensive gift from to do or to do to friends and relatives.
We all seem a little more attentive to aiming at the point of the question, willing to experiment with a new way free from superstructures, intent on regaining possession of the taste that small daily conquests give.
In this phase of general rethinking, it is easier to look back rather than forward, retracing a recent past that suddenly appears beautiful and distant to us is more gratifying than imagining a future full of unknowns and uncertainties while today, hic et nunc , has the flavor of a conquest earned with all the strength and determination we are capable of.
For this reason, even Christmas returns closer to its real canons, not glitz, business, holidays and lightheartedness but rather simplicity, concentration, shy rethinking.

The added value that this emergency gives us is perhaps precisely this, an opportunity to reconsider certainties stratified over time, redefine strategies and priorities, return to thinking more transparently about the deep meaning of one's existence. Here, in the absence of other opportunities, the upcoming Christmas I would like him to give me this, the courage and constancy to look outside and inside myself with different eyes, restless but without anguish, free, without overlapping and slow filters that deform reality , sincere eyes capable of reading and getting intoxicated with true feelings with which to feed the mind and heart in the certainty of better times.


Michelangelo Dotta
NP December 2020