I remember my father sometimes coming from work, around 5 in the afternoon. He walked slowly, not in a hurry, with a newspaper in his hand. He seemed to have all the time in the world. He walked as if thanking the world for its existence, beyond him, appreciating it, enjoying it, while he himself approached it a little, tangentially, as if he was part of it sometimes, and sometimes he was just a spectator.
He did not complain that he was 50 years old or older. Whatever it was, life went on, for better or worse. The years were there, as the world around him was there, he did not resist, he did not rebel, at least not on this subject. He gave me a certain feeling that time could stand still if we wanted to.
My mother, on the other hand, was always in a hurry, she was always busy, everything was against her time. It was as if she always wanted to stuff as much as possible in one day, otherwise the day didn’t make sense. She still does that, although lately she has moments when she says, “Leave it, I have time, I’ll do it at some point.”
Nowadays, most of us are like my mother: we do not know how to do as much as possible, to be more efficient, productive, to tick as much as possible, in all areas of life: career, family, education, spirituality, sports, health, friends. If we could make a mosaic with all this and much more every day, something varied in color would come out and which, later, would risk exhausting us. But the world moves like this, we have nowhere to go, most of the time.
From time to time, however, it may be worthwhile to walk among the others with a metaphorical newspaper in hand, walk slowly, and to look at the spectacle of the world as if we had a ticket to the theater. From the balcony we will be surprised to see differently than from the stage where we are actors ourselves.