Take the dog for a walk and find a book that shakes you with irrepressible emotions.
The other day, while taking the dog to do his needs at the small park on the street corner, I found a book on the bench where I usually sit.
It is expected, it is customary, to leave books on the benches in Brussels.
People leave them for those who arrive later, who may have something to read or take home if intrigued enough.
The book’s colour and shape intrigued me: a new blue-grey cover like a winter sky before a beautiful snowstorm.
It was in French; it took me a few seconds to understand what it was.
As soon as I saw the author, I remembered that I tore apart his books not so long ago.
Tom Robbins remains one of my favourite authors, and this was one of the books that most fascinated me in my life: “Fierce invalids Home from hot climates“.
Suddenly I remembered the moment I bought that book, in the fall of 2001. I was with my daughter, we were coming home from a trip to my parents, and we had the plane exchange in Milan, we were in Linate.
At that time, I read the book with impressive speed, I started it on the plane, and three days later, it was finished.
I was so impressed that I borrowed the name of its main protagonist (Switters) for my first nickname on an online group about rock/indie music. That name seemed to me decidedly rock’n’roll.
Spurred on by his previous books, I made the purchase spontaneously.
I took it on the plane, keeping it in plain sight. After all, I wanted to get noticed, like when I was younger and visited my favourite record store. I loved to get out from the shop without ever taking the bag to carry the records because I wanted others to see what I was hearing.
It was a show-off moment.
So much has been said about the damage of the pandemic.
Still, no one (or almost no one) is talking about the significant advantages there have been in having time to read.
So if in a business point of view was for so many a wrong moment, the benefit for ourselves was pretty significant.
Anyway, I still have an intense regret: I have not read enough in these two years.
I let myself be carried away by the various television series, so I promise that at the subsequent lockdown (there will be, right?) I will cancel the subscriptions to Netflix and the likes: waste time.
Instead, I will read again as when, as a kid, I spent hours and hours, without the distraction of phones, emails and other stupidities, reading like a madman.
I feel sorry for the younger generations, who have no idea how wonderful it was to be alone in our small rooms. Spend hours and hours, reading and reading and how wonderful it was then in the evening before sleeping with a book in our hands.
It was an additional hour on reading a book, generally around 10 pm.
Time spend weel, instead of chatting with friends and strangers (that is definitely weird), of useless things, on the various social networks where all of us are.
At the beginning of 2022, anything bothers me; I hear absurd speeches on TV even in media that I have always respected, the BBC, for example.
I don’t know if they have changed, if the society we live in is, or I am.
With more uncertainty swirling in my mind and with more disappointment within myself, I instinctively come to know that now is the time to be alive. Try to be who you want to be and dress as you want, and do what you want to do.
Let others go their own way; let you take another path.
Prove to yourself what you are and what you want.
Now it’s also time to go where you want to go.
I wish to fly to a place I’ve never been before or return to a classic place I have loved. Knowing that there will always be something new to discover and revisit in my memories.
March and Spring must concentrate on novelties, and your destination must make you relive culture and art. You must visit places with dynamic neighbourhoods in which to get lost.
Because we need to get lost and then find ourselves again.
Like me, I am sure that you want a new, unpublished page in the book of your life because there is not so much time ahead.
We had lost too much time in our lives in pointless worries before the first lockdown, in what we considered everyday life: the normality.
Now, personally, I do not want to lose time again in this new phase of our life in this post-pandemic time.
I want to turn to my personal travel advisor right now to help me with the logistics of planning my personal trip to achieve my dreams.
I find it inside me every night before sleeping; I talk to it, I think about it.
Acting like a madman who is convinced that he has an imaginary friend.
Starting from my interior, I found a group of specialists that I discovered to be the best in the industry. That will help me visit every point dreamed of in recent years.
They are the best travel consultants because they result from my experiences, disappointments, mistakes, and positive things, things are done in my previous life.
The goal of my battle right now is to say yes to the things that simply come my way.
I am planning a small dinner with the friends of the past.
An afternoon tea at a top-quality hotel in London.
A concert at the Brixton Academy.
A visit to the fish market of Genoa and a walk under the arcades of Bologna.
Getting lost along the canals of Amsterdam visiting small art galleries.
These are other things, events to which I have said yes in recent weeks, in the face of insistent requests from my soul, which knows me well, very well.
I know the risk, but I also see the reward of a radical change, of a new chapter in my life.
Because I’m starting to realize that I don’t have much time to do the things I still have to do.
And with my favourite new coat on, embellished with the blue scarf my mother gave me for my birthday, I’m ready to introduce myself to these new adventures.
The time has come to escape from the Hotel that guests us, fulfilling the false idea and security rhetoric. We have don’t realize that is always connected to the boredom of our existence.
I loved the simple palette of white, blue, and green on the nearby countryside grounds where I am. Still, I have had enough of this kind of false perfection simultaneously, and I feel I need a new adventure. Away from the barbarians, away from the rhetorical and bland that I recently discovered, they have kept me company for the last 20 years.
We start again, we go back, but to move forward.
Waiting for the times when a magnificent view of the water on the sea or the hills full of vines and apple trees allow me a new beginning, nourishing for my soul, always in pain.