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Eco123 Revista da Economia e Ecologia
Friday, 17th April 2020
A text by Dina Adão
Who am I? How important is intuition in my life? How do I react when I’m subjected to high levels of noise, pain or silence? What do I feel when people hug me closely? How does my body react when I deprive it of love? We live immersed in a world of information. But, like never before, we are screaming inside. Due to a lack of respect, harmony and inner peace.
Now and then, we can cross the country on high-speed trains and fool some people some of the time, but we can’t do it constantly and fool everyone all the time. At some point, we will have to stop at a station or a halt along the line and we will feel like foreigners. We will have to look at the big clock – which is our own and nobody else’s – and feel the time the hands are showing. In ‘A House’ – the Casa-Museo José Saramago, in Lanzarote, the hands of the clocks are stopped at 4 pm, the time when José and Pilar met, the time at which something earthshattering happened in their lives.
Yes, stopping can lead us to real discoveries. We will undoubtedly have the task of removing the dust, the unwanted things, the fruits of the neglect to which we have abandoned ourselves; then there will be an urgent need to look for the best ways to find the path to our centre. We must learn again to take the first steps, to make choices, to understand who we are, to understand what we are doing here, where we want to go and with whom. In order to get to know each other better, it’s essential that we get to know our own emotions deeply, discover what touches and motivates us, or what annoys and disgusts us. And, predicting what we will choose when faced with an image may seem simple, but it is far from being so. Television audiences, phishing sites and social media know this and have learned how to exploit our emotions in an almost criminal way. But knowing our emotions also means knowing that these are determined by social, family, historical and cultural influences. And this, in turn, means refusing to be held captive by them.
In this period, when time imposes itself with a harsh and unquestionable reality, it’s urgent that each of us knows how to listen to what the depths of our being are giving back to us. Yes, because we are all screaming – and we are all crying – each of us in our own way. After a month confined at home, many are now struggling with such problems as weariness and inner conflict. Looking inside is not always easy. And it doesn’t help much to think that we now have many things that we really wanted before, because these came to us without a choice and choice is one of the most valuable tools we have in life. Faced with the great mass of information that floods into our room every day, the future itself looks like that, a projection that is about to change at any moment.
What will life be like when “everything” returns to apparent “normality”? What will have changed within me, within you, or within the whole world? I look at the horizon bathed in the sun and wind. There are no answers. I want to think that I’m open to whatever comes. I repeat the old questions: Who am I? Where am I going? With whom? Nothing here will be as it used to be. This has taken root within me as a certainty. Some paradigms have been broken.
I let myself be, aware of the seasons and aware that it is essential to feel them, so that I can know that, like them, I too will change.
