Last update: January 04, 2016
I am vulnerable. A gust of wind can bring down a tree branch and end my life. A car could hit me while I cross the street and take me away forever. As I write these words, my heart may stop beating.
This or much more could happen to you too. You are vulnerable, like me and like the people you love: yours mother, your son, a friend.
And with that I don't want to scare you. Recognizing that ultimately our life is not in our hands only makes us more aware, because it is the truth.
But why talk about it? Because I have the feeling that more and more people are losing awareness of how fragile our existence is. It might seem unimportant, but its consequences are: we live in a reality that does not exist, it is an invitation to a poisoned dinner.
We draw a line on the calendar days like when we were bored counting how many days of school were left before the holidays. We doze off in buses and train carriages, open and close the front door over and over. We are like locomotives that travel the same path over and over.
We waste our time posing, protecting, attacking, gossiping about others. In the shop of life, we act like the rich man who walks in and buys everything he wants as if his money is infinite, as if our time were infinite.
Take stock. Put everything you do for pleasure on one plate and all your commitments and activities on the other. There is something wrong?
However, it's not just us who are wrong, it's the whole of society. The time each person has to spend at work in order to survive is enormous.
We allow ourselves the luxury of telling children that if they study and train, then they can do their dream job. How can we lie so blatantly? Do the jobs that today's company offers respect everyone's dreams? Everyone imagine what they prefer.
Another sad consequence of the lack of awareness of our vulnerability and our running along the tracks is that suffering is foreign to us. We think that if we do things right, if we take the right path and put into practice the virtues of effort and sacrifice, everything will be fine.
So why should we help someone who has freely chosen not to follow the recipe for success? We accept that misery exists because we think it is the consequence of the actions of those who suffer from it, because we think it will never touch us.
And so, our perception of being invulnerable and the lack of similar suffering in our life separate us, mentally, from the people who are worse off than us.
Only when something happens that makes us feel that the barrier that separates us has collapsed, do we look up from the book we are reading, do we recover our human nature. For this to happen, we have to experience that experience more closely, and before the train arrives at its destination.
Image courtesy of Annette Shaf
