One afternoon in an ordinary Tuesday (English version)
The four were sitting on a small bench in the hallway of the second floor of the university. As in a queue tense of a doctor’s office, they were waiting to make the oral French test individually. They were two guys, a girl and an old lady. In that dim corridor, while one of the boys was taking a few quick notes to use in the test and the other two young breathed relieved by the challenge already faced, the old woman was talking a lot. She spoke about the attack in Paris, showed the pictures of the grandchildren on the phone and suddenly began to tell about when she began studying French at university two years ago.
“I came all shy in a group of people much younger than me. But I was there and I faced. I’ve never been afraid of anything. I just was always afraid of being afraid of something”.
She said she was the oldest of her brothers and always had to struggle to achieve her dreams.
“As I speak to my grandchildren: “Saddled horses don’t pass twice in your life”, if you have an opportunity, you need to enjoy and take it, because it will not happen again”.
Sometimes I think we are losing the ability to produce and carry out concrete actions. To feel and really live with intensity. We are losing the ability to bond, because we have no time. We are fully entertained in our virtual little world with messages from WhatsApp and Facebook updates.
“We like to think we have everything under control. But deep down we don’t have control of anything”.
She also remembered the test, she was the first to face the teacher’s questions:
“I asked the teacher what made him happy… you know, it’s no use thinking that we will be happy next year when traveling to somewhere or when we’ll do something in particular… I’m already happy to come to the French class every week. I’m happy when I watch a movie on television. I am happy now”.
The future doesn’t belong to us. And we forget that and we’re just living day after day in automatic mode. In a warm rhythm. As if we had all eternity ahead of us.
