DAY9: KUNG FU FABRI

MIRIAM 9 – Tonight I wanna start with the last image I have right in front of me while I’m writing: my son, who monopolized the living room to do kung fu live with his teacher. I look at him while, with a determination I didn’t think he had, he does push ups, squats, abs. He is sweating, he stumbles but he doesn’t give up. I’ve never seen a kung fu practice before, usually they don’t allow parents. But now I can see him as he follows carefully his master’s instructions, as he counts in Chinese (!!), as he works hard as if it were the last thing he’ll ever do in is life. If a month ago I had asked him to commit like that I think he would have told me to go to hell. His attitude really makes me understand that human beings, no matter the age, can adapt to all kinds of difficulties.

Everything is changing around us, these days, and we are changing as well, trying to find new shapes for our tracks, and after nine days I can say that – thank God – we are succeeding. Our will to live, to rebuild the foundations of the new normal, where we can let our days go by again, is too strong for us to give up. We never made a revolution, it’s true, but we are revolutionizing ourselves. And the farther we go, the more it  grows in me the certainty that we will never be the same as before. We will be better.

ANDREA 9 – My personal revolution of today is made of three things: 1. a smell, the smell of new boardgames and their boxes, 2. a tactile sensation, the one of the plastic pieces and the wooden dice, 3. a mood: the carefreeness of an 8 years old. What we bought online on day 6 has finally arrived. The number of players necessary is 3, and so we played. The revolution is that it took a virus to let me feel like a kid again, the same kid that at Christmas would unwrap Super Cluedo and Monopoly to play straight away with his cousins. It took the virus to remind me to blow off some steam. The revolution is the contrast between the Andrea of today and the Andrea of 30 years ago, that have just met tonight at a table. One came with a beard, short hair, the iPhone in one hand, and airpods on after having just finished a videocall with colleagues, the other came without a beard, curly hair, a Nutella sandwich in one hand and the headphones on after having just switched off the radio after a Napoli game. The younger one shook the hand of the older one and said: “Nice to meet you, where have you been?”