6 minute read
Prose on Change
by Chiara Parrucci
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There's a spot at the port of Thessaloniki, where you can sit on the most outer part of the city land, with your feet just above the sea. As it is a sunny and bright day, in front of me I can clearly see the profile of Mount Olympus. I stretch my back to look behind me: with just one gaze, I can embrace the whole seafront. Thessaloniki is a city that resisted many events, and its architecture has been here to witness it. Every time I look around, a new detail appears: I challenge you to focus on the buildings and not to think "Wait a minute! When did they add this balcony?!?" I spot a façade of some building from the 20ies, and it gets all of my attention: such buildings are so rare, as the city almost got destroyed back then. In the following decades, new edifices were erected to substitute the previous ones and satisfy the population growth. Further, I recognise Aristotelous Square’s carmine columns, and on the very right, the White Tower.
Once – it is common knowledge – it was called Red, a reference to the colour of blood, as it was a place of pain and torture. Now, in White, it has become the symbol of the city and the background for pictures and happy faces.
I assume a more natural position and continue to look in front of me: it's easy to get stuck focusing on the small waves that ripple the sea whilst a mild wind blows from the city. The shapes the waves take are similar to one another yet different all the time, they remind me fractals, and I can't help but dive into my thoughts. It's a Thursday afternoon and, as a personal rule, nothing special happens on Thursday: too soon for the weekend, too late in the week to pick it as the day for a "fresh new start". It's okay, I have learnt to accept Thursdays as a necessary evil to take time and reflect on what to improve in my life «starting from next Monday». Amazingly enough, we are told that there's always room for changing what we don't like, but we shouldn't take failure too personally. How on earth am I supposed to accept my expectations torn apart by reality, if I moulded the idea into an action?! I expect something to really happen, you know? As far as I am concerned, the most effortless change is the one brought unexpectedly by the fate: at least, you can always use it as an excuse for the next failure. Anyway, as human beings, we are constantly subjected to at least two types of change: we passively experience the physical one, also called the body decay, and there's nothing we can do about it, nor anti-ageing creams that will save us from it. And there's the invisible one, particularly related to our emotions. Both of them are our real companions as they travel at our side day after day. A more indulgent way to put it is that change makes us grow and growth leads to maturity… Sometimes it's more than enough to meet one single new person to find out a lot more about ourselves (that's also a fast and verified method to broaden our horizons or to start hating something).
We experience change, as I said, in the smallest things happening every day: if you are a lonely traveller on your road to work, there will always be someone different sitting close to you on the bus even if you take the same bus day after day. Or think about things that all of a sudden have been called differently, like the EVS, now ESC. Moreover, what else is a squat if not an abandoned place that the bravery of a few people – if not a single person – transformed into a place for social inclusion? One day you forget to put flour in the dough, and you create a new cake (the Caprese cake), the day after you forget to close the gas while leaving the house and the life of an entire street is changed forever. Speaking of which, after your life just exploded like a grenade between your arms, small changes are the things from which start to rebuild your own identity. Can you do something to avoid all the bad changes?
1/ˈstaʧe/ or stuh-chew. A colloquial yet not vulgar expression. It is considered to come from Rome. It is used to express the idea of "accept what happened even though you wouldn't like to, and don't try to complain about it".
As someone once told me, human life is nothing but the sum of good and bad moments, so if you want the good things you need to take also the bad ones. It seems a cheesy explanation of how life goes on, right? Okay, then, let's look at the ancient Greek language: the word "crisis" back then had a positive meaning, as it was considered the moment in which you were called to take action, that is to create a new state of things, put differently, to embrace change. And it’s totally fine by me, once you get the rules of the game. Still, right now we aren't only dealing with the consequences of a constant and natural change, we have also been forced to accept and act accordingly to all the changes that the outbreak of the pandemic brought with itself... And now our lives are twice as more challenging as... but maybe this is also a part of the Change, I mean, not two different changes but just one with three main faces… and we are supposed to accept the situation and adapt to the new reality as much as the previous generations, our predecessors, had to take the inevitable and try to build a life with what they had… and maybe soon enough in a new edition of any medical book we will read "Covid-19: eradicated", and I hope to live enough to see such description for many other severe illnesses, starting from HIV and - - -
The sound of a shoe rubbing on the asphalt announces the shape of a guy that sits almost two meters away from me on my left side: maybe he came to sit and contemplate life too. I put my eyes on him, I don't know what I am expecting to happen, but somewhere I read that it can be just a smile you share with a stranger to change his or her life for good. As he never lifts his eyes, the moment is lost. So where was I? Ah, I lost the thread too. The wind is now blowing from the sea to the city, the waves changed their direction, and soon enough they will start to shatter against the quay. It's better to go, while the rosy-fingered dawn casts its light all around the place.
