Amazon Does Not Sell Survival Kits For a Hugless World
Perhaps reality was not compatible with a world at peace.
All of a sudden, while life was moving at a pace that seemed unstoppable, the pace slows down, life is put on hold — even though time out there, on its own, seems to advance at a different speed — , and the trajectories through which our routine, our expectations and our ambitions were flowing are diverted. Our society brings out vulnerabilities that we had all taken it upon ourselves to conceal: before this, the world should not have turned pale.
For its part, this great blue globe continues to take 23 hours, 56 minutes and some 4 seconds, approximately, to turn in on itself with an inclination that has not varied one iota from 23.5º and, as viewed from the north pole star Polaris, it does this whole process counterclockwise.
This leads me to observe the fragility, this time, exclusive to the human race and the conception of time as a life-saving construct to give a little meaning to our wandering. Tick, tick, tick, tick. The deer invade the city of Nara, dolphins visit Venice’s canals, although they do not see the gondoliers that appear on the postcards, and the hawks fly over the sky of Madrid. I observe everything like when I’m holding a snow globe on my hands and I shake it to see how the artificial snowflakes float in the glycerine.
Meanwhile, the foundations of ideas and elements begin cracking, whose solidity we would have dared to question residually, not least without being able to avoid an incriminating index finger because of questioning certain things. The concept of globalisation teeters, despite its ever-increasing scope, as we know it today; the dogmas of a liberal capitalism that now encloses a good part of the population in flats of less than 100 square metres, without a terrace, are wavering, as are some company directors who write fewer and fewer motivational messages on LinkedIn — what would they want to tell us with this not-to-be-seen attitude — ; it even wavers the way we move, the way we work, and the way we interact with each other.
Given the circumstances, everything that we thought was in balance, may not have been that much, and what worked in the past, maybe it didn’t to the point we thought it did. Of course, this was more or less so, depending on the beholder’s eye and the sufferer’s flesh. Harmony or the lack of it is purely a matter of perspective.
The newness of this situation is that it is the first time that our generation has been confronted with a universal standstill, with circumstances that are typical of a conflict (which explains the language used by the media on this subject); never before have we been dragged out of our comfort zone and taken home for a particular time-out, like when we were punished in the school. Without there being any real war, however, today we see the world struggling between doubts about, for example, increasingly extensive supply chains and their interdependence in the face of countries’ internal shortages, as well as a reluctance to establish links that used to be established in good times, as in the European Cupboard-Love Union.
“What an unrealistic situation”, we say to each other like a tag line since the alarm went off. Perhaps the unreality was to live in perpetual calm and reality was not compatible with a world at peace. Fortunately, we have not known anything else; it was much better to stay inside that utopian bubble.
In this context of politics that we all feel weak, inanimate, scarce when it should less seem so; an economy that languishes and suffers from its own shortcomings or, more than shortcomings, its own sludge; as well as a healthcare system that, however robust it may be, gets stuck, everything becomes small when I think of the slowness with which a curve that drowns so many countries is flattened, because it does not matter how fast it seems to do so when the count is dealing with human lives. I also think of those who not only die, but take with them the Extreme Unction of loneliness: beds that are silent, while their window to the world is a screen — may God bless it— that lights up to bring a little hope until the last moment; walls or plasterboard walls that shut so many last breaths up; funerals without wreaths or tears, at a time when we appreciate the wreaths, the crying and the short distances that such scenarios have always made essential.
In spite of the advances and a society that can adapt to work from home, purchase online or even to leisure, there is still no tool sufficiently developed, agile or powerful that replaces the physical contact, the oxytocin that releases a tight embrace, the love that keeps in itself a caress. We were not prepared and we did not buy, before the state of alarm, a survival kit for a world without hugs. On Amazon they don’t sell it yet.
“It cannot be that we are here without the ability to be,” wrote Julio Cortázar in Rayuela; “we must force reality to respond to our dreams, we must continue to dream until we abolish the false frontier between the illusory and the tangible, until we realize ourselves and discover that the lost paradise is there, just around the corner”.
We didn’t realize that life was to be taken seriously so we didn’t take it that way.
At this point, nothing is certain about the foundations of our current economic system, the relations between countries and the further development of globalization in the future. What will be ordinary from now on? How will be the daily rhythms that sustain and drag us along? In a framework of uncertainties that surrounds each and every one of the scenarios, the only thing that we can get clear is that the human being has never felt as much as he did when he was deprived of his freedom of movement, of receiving and giving the love of or to his neighbor, whether he was family or just a passer-by who smiles when holding the door of the subway station, or he was asked to keep his distance as a definitive act of love.
Behind that palette of greys with which they embellish the perspectives from the media, there is hidden a green light, like Waldo was in his books. A green light that, paradoxically, maintains its luminosity with the lack of news from home: the tedium that these similar days produce is now a comfortable place to stay and live. “Is everyone healthy over there? Everything alright at home, Mom, like yesterday? That’s the good news.”
The desires we left in waiting mode will start to rush off again, we will want to see the sun from below and not through a window’s sill and the grandparents in their retirement homes, hopefully, will receive the visit of their grandchildren. It will be worth the loneliness and writing these lines far from home, only a street far from my grandparents’ house. Afterwards we will return with more appetite: to the arms of our families, to our hometowns, to the simple days.
I want to believe, and I do, that things, if not well, will not be as grey as they seem they will; that freedom will once again fill the streets with merriment, whispers and excited vocatives; and there will be springs that will blossom outside these four walls. We will survive a hugless world to return to it and embrace each other not with the same, but with greater enthusiasm than before.
