La Voz de Galicia – December 31, 2021 →
Well, there goes another year. Full of uncertainty, like the previous one, and full of insecurity, also like the previous one. But another year also ends when we could perhaps reflect about what it means to be alive, and about the kind of life we wish to have in the next chapter of our existence.
Without a doubt, 2021 was a complex year, although if one stops to think about what this word means, I figure that there has not been a single year that has not been complex. Yet the level of complexity with which the pandemic has taught us to live has been extremely tiring, and many of us throughout this year learned about the consequences of the incredible mental exhaustion that originates in not being sure about anything at all.
But today, looking for good things to share in this last column of the year, I thought that perhaps that idea, the one about learning to live with insecurity, could be the most important lesson of 2021. Because, unlike my parents, I grew up in well-being, in the certainty of food on the table, in the belief that our existence was infinitely easier than theirs because at least we already knew the steps that we had to follow to be able to survive. But the reality was never so. That level of security with which they who could not go to school taught their children to live, that notion that “if you do this, you will reach this other thing” was always a utopia because for them, certainty meant a forever job, and not all of us find joy in the idea of being one single thing in life.
So, if in 2021 I learned that perhaps life also consists of learning to live with the certainty that we will never have security in absolutely everything, and that there is also beauty in that…
