Alessandro D'Avenia
May 23, 2022
“I'm 23 years old and I feel dead. I implement my projects in study and work, I have enough friends, but I am always dissatisfied. In recent months, especially, my heart has been callous and icy. There is no more love in my life: how can I break through this shell in order to meet life halfway and discover my calling?”
A guy recently wrote this to me. The metaphor of ice reminded me of a line I recently read with my students: when Dante finds himself at the bottom of hell, contrary to what we expect, there is no fire or flame, but only a frozen plain in which sinners are stuck. The ice is produced by the huge wings of Lucifer, which with their movement freeze the water of the Cocytus River, into which the worst sinners are immersed, among whom you remember Count Ugolino. Dante knows that the opposite of love (amore), with which he always associates the verb muovere (to move) is not hatred, but control and paralysis: where there is no love, there is no initiative and creativity. Many young people and others are in this hellish frozen state: hearts frozen by dislike, minds frozen in fear, bodies weakened by loneliness.
How do we lose love and, as a result, the ability to move towards life in order to discover our calling?
A culture that demonstrates to the point of exhaustion that the world is terrible (disease, war, violence...) and at the same time prevents the possibility of changing it is a culture of control and paralysis. There are two consequences, especially for young people: to close in your discomfort, trying to drown it out, or to participate in destruction, turning it against yourself and others. The day before yesterday this became obvious to me when I took my niece to a park where young people skate. I heard one of them, who, between his tricks, said: “I smoke weed, but when I feel like an addiction is starting, I quit because I stop feeling relief, but then after a while, I start again because I need to. And again I become dependent and so a new circle begins: but there is no other way to withstand all this...”
Pain under anesthesia does not allow creativity to come out, as happens with Dante’s sinners who, with their heads thrown back, cry and their tears crystallize in the orbits of the eyes, turning into an icy crust that does not give way to the next ones, increasing suffering. I see that what characterizes a person and especially young people is disappearing: the ability to be creative, aspiration and involvement in changing the world, inventing something new, precisely because what you don’t like around you is not enough and makes you suffer. In a young skater, pain does not transform into a struggle or even a restless question, like the guy in the letter. And yet it is precisely this pain, if not extinguished, that would become necessary to find a calling or, as they say in Japanese ikigai (combine what you know and what you love, share it for the benefit of others and make a living from it, in general, the “engine of life”).
Crises of fate are crises of upbringing: family and school are needed precisely in order for ikigai everyone. The "Impossible 2022" report on the rights of minors, recently presented in Rome by the organization Save the children, shows that in Italy material poverty (1.3 million children live in absolute poverty) is accompanied by educational poverty: 51% children 15 years old do not understand the meaning of the text and are not able to form judgments about it. These things do not happen by chance: in Italy the expenditure on the welfare of minors is 2% (the European average is twice as much) and we are the last EU country in terms of total public spending on education (we like to match Europe only in some points, for example defense spending We are in the absolute norm of the European average).
The Agency for Statistics revealed in a recent report on Welfare that in our country one in four young people between 15 and 29 years old is not studying or working, a negative lead in the EU, in addition to Italians aged 30-34 years old who hold a post-secondary diploma ( university or courses) are 27% compared to 41% for their European peers. A country with insufficient inclusion (welfare and education) will end up in bankruptcy of vocations. The situation has worsened even further in the last period due to the fact that “cognitive implosion” has been defined, which is the fruit of: quarantines, distance learning, social networks, lost hours of sleep and decreased communication with peers. When life is paralyzed rather than inspired, a frost seizes hearts and heads. There is an illusion of freedom because there is access to many things in the virtual universe and the Internet, while the inner universe is frozen. The opposite of ice is the warmth of relationships, which are the mother’s womb of our true “I”, at any age.
The hunger of birth is more radical than the fear of death, but if the latter dominates, then this is already a cultural problem: we internalize death so much that we prefer it to life, we feel guilty for the fact that we live and become unable to move.
First of all, we need an internal uprising, which, based precisely on pain, turns it into action, as it was necessary to do when we returned to school after a period of distance learning (while we were still in class, at the end of May, even while keeping a distance and opening the windows, we sit in masks, which are not needed in bars and discos, where the same guys go). We need to reconsider: policies that are unable to care for citizens where this care is clearly needed (hospitals and schools); television reduced to an arena where individuals are affirmed through combat, confrontation (from reality and talk shows, passing through talent shows); a school that does not help you take care of yourself and the world, that bases growing up not on the blossoming of your vocation, but on the amount of knowledge and competition; the contribution of social networks that encourage identity construction through envy. The ice we have in our hearts is the hellish result of a culture of control rather than good relationships from which to blossom. ikigai everyone. In this regard, I was struck by the phenomenon defined as the “Great Resignation” that took place in Lombardy in 2021: 10% workers with permanent contracts (419.754 out of 4.4 million employed) left in order to find a better life-work balance and half of them are under 35 years old. This is not leaving work, but moving to one where there is motivation and better conditions. This panorama may seem gloomy, but there is already good news, the culture of control, the modern illusion that claims to realize life, personal and social, through domination (by the soul, by another person, by nature) is becoming unbearable. There is an urgent need to inspire a culture of freedom through good relationships, where the expression “I am free” does not equal “I am single”, but “I am busy, involved”, precisely because by loving and being loved, the true “I” finds its way among the sea of lies and illusions that promise happiness at the cost of control.
In fact, the guy’s letter already contains the answer in the sequence: pain, love, courage, calling, so I tell him: accept your crisis, enter your pain, respect it and love it as the beginning of healing. And look for teachers, true love: reduce the number of unnecessary relationships and free yourself from those (physical and virtual) that control, gradually discovering for yourself the miracle that you are, you will gain the courage to go towards life even if it is difficult, moreover, exactly its difficulty is the raw material for your vocation... And maybe instead of turning on the TV, you, who are lucky in that you can still understand the texts, read a book that can tell you about things like my friend recently wrote to me about Aeneas:
“In the story of Aeneas, motivation comes mainly from the experience of love, from the experience of relationships. It is by thinking about his wife, father, son, the people he loves, that Aeneas responds, reacts. In times like ours, in which individualism dominates, we are no longer able to read life in terms of relationships. And very often we want to look only in ourselves, in the loneliness of our “I,” for the motivation to react, to make the right choice. But only and only when our lives come into contact with a love other than our self does responsibility kick in, pushing us to make choices we would not otherwise make. And if the first thing to do is to react, then we always react thanks to someone’s love.”
Luidi Maria Epicolo, Aeneas' Choice
This is confirmed by Dante, who, the closer he approaches Love, which moves the Sun and other luminaries, the more he sees a picture opposite to the icy paralysis: the dance and the unified chorus increase step by step (love moves and touches - com-muove - unites in motion) . Of course, the poet is operating in the image of "perichoresis", a Greek term that describes an incredibly beautiful circular dance and which in theology is used to describe the individuals of the Trinity, in which the "we" exceeds the sum of the individuals and overwhelms, drawing people into the love they want to receive and giving, as happens in a human couple giving life. The opposite of an icy heart is a dancing heart: when we stop dancing, individually and together, it is because we have chosen Control, which frees us from the difficulty of becoming ourselves, over Love, which makes us truly free because it gives us the courage to become ourselves. , whatever it takes.
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