The lesson about ourselves that comes to us from life in a pandemic

In a time like the one we are going through with fatigue, frustration, fear, it is necessary to highlight a new side and perspective. There are lessons that only in retrospect can we recognize as such since the emergency character often takes away the vision of the present and of the here and now.
This is the time when we all have the opportunity to make sense and value what we are going through. We are immersed in this traumatic lesson but if we change the question from “When and how will we get out of it?” a “What can we do with what is happening to us and what we are experiencing?”We would discover that the resources of the human soul are often surprising and unexpected.

The current clinic bears witness to this. Every day I meet the amazement of those who, in pain and suffering, manage to transform themselves, adapt, cross uncertainty by questioning themselves.
The increase in requests for treatment is not only the proportional sign of suffering but also of the will to go through pain and contradicts what the writer said Elias Canetti in Power and survival: “dodging the concrete is one of the most disturbing phenomena in the history of human spirit”.
What I encounter today is a willingness to face, not to dodge, perhaps also dictated by the reflections that the constraint of “empty” times have generated. We have all been, no one excluded, collectively and subjectively questioned in our beliefs, in everyday life, in our gestures, thoughts, habits, “uses and customs”, in the imaginary certainties built over decades. This disruption of the vision of the world and of time must become a possibility because it is from the turmoil that something new can be born and a transformation can be made.
We are proving to have dormant resources that the irruption of this collective trauma has brought to light.
Uncertainty, precariousness, fear cannot be an excuse or brake to give up creativity, imagination, poetry, freedom. What becoming adults, the fast pace, the responsibilities had made us forget and take for granted, is also re-emerging in everyday life.
As the artist would say Claudio Parmiggiani, it is necessary to transform the wounds into poetry and the ashes into light. We are witnesses and protagonists of a paradoxically precious time in which the eruption of a sneaky, invisible, universal virus would like to paralyze us in terror and despair but cannot do it completely because the human being knows how to put what appears to be still in motion and always knows how to make something of what happens to him.

(* Federica Cairoli is a psychologist at the Center for Psychoanalytic Clinic of Jonas Monza Brianza Onlus)