These strange days
The tourists went missing a few months ago. In April I have opened my house in Milan for no holidaymakers, almost all residents of Italy. People whose needs differ from those who leave their homes for a short time to visit my city on pleasure.
I learned to travel a much larger sea than I had ever explored. I mapped out a new course. I raised my sails again, catching new winds and I didn't capsize.
And I liked to get lost and then find myself again, following different rhythms with less effort. I loved to walk through spaces where there was no sign of me.
When one morning in May, by the end of the rental period, an anesthesiologist who worked in intensive care unit offered to help me clean out the room, my angsty vision, fueled by the uncertainty of the present, melted as breath into the wind.
Any anxiety appeared to have dissolved and my state of mind was changed. I felt good after that talk with her. I felt lighter. I must say, life never ceases to amaze me.
The simplicity and composure of the people I have hosted in recent months have reassured me considerably. Because that’s what hosting does: it is a light that warms the soul, generates trust, relieves fear and creates positive relations.
You get rid of stereotypes and destroy usual patterns, and in doing so, make yourselves available to listen to your fellow humans.
The greatest value of hosting people at the moment is in this restoring, healing ability that makes us feel more united than ever right when we’re apart.
Miraculously, free from the yoke of routine and indifference, we care about people with different needs than the tourists, which are no less urgent in many cases: we care about the teacher who does long-distance learning on the computer because in his home in these days he can’t do that, a businessman visiting the area looking for a home office where he can also work, the son who had his elderly father hospitalized here in Milan, a teacher who is waiting to be released from quarantine, a male nurse who worried he would test positive for Covid-19 and wanted to be away from his family to limit the chances of contagion.
These strange days have made me feel useful in the hour of need.
These strange days made me ask about who I am instead of what I do.
These strange days put me back in touch with my roots.
These strange days have restored the desire for purity and the thrill of hosting of my early years, a Dyonisian inebriation which eases the heaviest of burdens.
In a time when all of us are forced to a total rethinking of social relations, of our arrogant nothingness, of the true values that count, and of our place on Earth, this, beyond the economic return, is the best gift that I could ever desire.
