Reflections on the value of life
This evening the question came without noise, as breath comes when at last I allow myself to remain alone with myself. The lamp throws soft light over the table, the tea has already gone cold, and somewhere between the silence of the room and the silence inside me, that old, almost shy question takes shape: does my life matter. It does not always come in the same way. Sometimes it dresses itself as exhaustion after years of work without recognition, when the effort I have invested suddenly seems superfluous, as if I had built a house that no one will ever inhabit. Other times it comes as loneliness, not the dramatic kind, but the quiet, everyday kind, when the people I love are somewhere nearby, but their gaze does not reach me. It comes with age, with illness, with unemployment, with the postponed dream that no longer resembles me, or simply on an ordinary evening when the noise of tasks subsides and I am left face to face with my own existence, naked, without roles, without expl...