CONCLUSIONS tonalestate 2015
The subject, the conferences, the thoughts that were part of Tonalestate 2015, have put each one of us also this year in front of a responsibility. So many people asked: what can we do? Or asked: what should I do? We all need to discover a real place where we can ask those questions.
Actually, we’re in a world suffocated by injustice, a world that causes such an unfair pain in so many people, some of them live in countries far away from us, in countries that we didn’t even know they exist or that we maybe only knew their names thanks to travel agencies advertisings. We’ve seen how many people is suffering in other languages different from ours e we’ve seen that their pain is not less than our personal pain. Must of us has never suffered such a terrible situations, as Syria fugitives or like Fukushima people, or like those people that live in central America peripheries, where we’ve seen people force ti live with nothing: We’ve felt the pain of mothers and fathers, of young people, that were forced to leave their countries looking for a job in order to send some money to their families, they even take the risk to be tortured, raped, and even killed by cops. And the masters of the world would like to convince us, that these exiled are criminals, just because they don’t have regular residence documents or because they don’t’ speak well our language, or because they don’t know our habitudes and stole our wallets because they need some bread, a house, clothes, books, art, hobbies just like us. Probably none of us have never seen his father or friend die of thirsty, hungry or tiredness, running away from a well created by those that spend their weekends playing golf. But now we all know that too much people have seen their beloved dying like this. Or they’ve seen then disappear: they’re so many, too many desaparecidos that are buried in mass grieves where nobody is going to bring flowers ever.
But we’ve also seen how many people commit themselves in order to help those that they have near. We’ve seen people that take care from others, those that are miserable, those that are hungry, those that are poor, those that are in danger not receiving medals or consolation prize. As they used to say years ago, we’ve met people that act “in front of angels”, with no ne praising them or value them. And we wonder: where do they found the strength to come out of themselves and dedicate their lives to other with such a persistence, courage and intelligence? In a few words, where this deep kindness comes from?
We’ve heard that it would be fair to imitate them in our daily life, making the same things they do, with those that are next to us, at school or at work, because every person who’s next to us, has a wound just like us, a wound that needs to be healed. We’ve heard that it would be fair to stop losing our time, with gossips, taking advantage, stealing, manipulating envying, thinking about useless things. We’ve heard that it’s time to change direction.
If we heard that, it means that we’ve started to realize that it’s our nature that demands us to be interested in others and that the more we live this demand the more we get realized.
What can I do? I have friends, I have beauty that surrounds me, I can read books, I have time and strength, and I have the conscience that evil is evil and that it hurts, and that good is good and makes you feel good. The darkness of the world becomes my oath darkness: which is my vocation? Calling? Where am I called to live my path to kindness?
The first step to do in order to answer to all these questions is to know that we are not capable to love. It’s to realize that we need that someone takes us by hand and teach us to love. Because our instinctive love, our sentimental love, our “feeling things and persons” is inconsistent, it doesn’t lasts, is uncapable to resist to the most elemental proof. In fact we are disposed to hurt those that are near us, for nothing, for vanity, for earning a little bit of time or space. We are unable of love.
We must allow someone to teach us that love is charity. Charity is the main law of life, the supreme law of life.
Charity is not to give money. Charity is to put yourself together with others. And this law comes first that any fondness, that any commotion: do something for the others doesn’t need a special feeling, because it’s already a feeling that doesn’t need anything else.
There’s another thing that must be clear: the fact of putting ourselves together with others may not give any result: the only concrete attitude to have is the one that makes you to care about the other, to consider the other person. The rest can come or maybe won’t come. This urgency to change things can be contaminated with the almightiness delirium and we have to pay attention to this risk.
As Brecht used to say, we don’t’ have to commit to create a new order in the world, we don’t have to commit ourselves to create a new world, but we must love the world, or as Professor Giovanni Riva said we must yearn for the entire world.
And if we undertake together this path of loving the others, letting us be guided by those that see most clearly than us, we might discover things that we didn’t even imagine, we might discover what does it means realize ourselves, we might discover what rise again means. Who does that, who turns those words in reality is happy.
And it’s with this promise to dedicate ourselves to the others, together, dear friends that we greet each other with a happy ¨¡hasta siempre!”.
Thank you everyone.