Desiderata beyond the pandemic

By Manuel Calviño, Doctor of Psychological Sciences and university professor.
December 24, 2020

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann for CubaNews.

Law on National Symbols discussed in Cuba. Photo: Archives.

We are closing the year, and in the passage to the coming one, a spiritual exercise is always advised: to decide what we are going to stay with to give food to our soul.

Some people may remain with a dark and sad memory that may recount tensions, ravings of anguish and uncertainty, and return to what was lost, to sickness and death. Selfish attitudes, on the verge of the sinister, contextual dissolutions turned into definitive, up to the queues and the lack of supplies sowing laziness and uneasiness.

To sit on this side of the problem, is a legitimate and possible decision, but a grim and demobilizing one.

It will be better then to forget what happened, turn the page, and have a little faith that things will get better (because worse is impossible). “You have to have faith that everything will come,” said the magnificent Consuelo Vidal with a double sense of libertarian inspiration. But not even the perceived gravity alone makes what faith recommends fall. Faith must be helped.

However, others, others will remember what we were able to do in the face of such adversity. We will recover the solidarity we have experienced, the responsibility we have assumed not only for our own life but also for that of others. We will take charge of the capacities we mobilize to do what is possible and more… and much more, and we will not leave them behind, we will multiply them. We will feel grateful for the friendship, the companionship, the good humor that we did not lack. We will tell what happened to us, only to make what we did the protagonist of the experience.

We will recognize that we learned to see better, to discover the smile behind the nasobuco and to love in the middle distance. That we rediscovered the value of being a good person, of thinking about ourselves. Resilience is not in the blow, in the fall, but in overcoming it, more when it enriches the very meaning of existence.

Then, those of the cosmogonic side of intelligent optimism, of the certainty of the hands and not only of the heart, those that today we would say. “We must help faith to walk, to be given”, we will close the year with a deep sense of achievement. We will feel that life is not a casual event, it is a construction – that we make it, we enjoy it, and, of course, from time to time we suffer it, but in the equation, we put everything in its place, and in the place of the summary remains the possible utopia, the one we can conquer, the one that bewitches us with the best feelings.

To those who opt for the first option, I suggest to be indulgent with the clumsiness of nature that we mistreat so much and that responds with strength, to be benevolent with people, with oneself, with life (so beautiful even in its imperfection), and to join those who are grateful for the generous act of living and making life grow.

To those who are undecided, not to delay any more their decision to be tied to the commitment with the creative and redeeming soul.

And to the others, to whom I believe we are the most, just say: thank you very much for the company on this journey that has helped us grow, thank you very much for reaching the metaphorical birth of Christmas with renewed vows of prosperity, well-being and happiness.

Let’s keep on doing together, being doers of our destiny, knowing perfectible but grateful, improvable but satisfied.

Dreaming is the premonitory foretaste that gives us hope, that which drives us and moves us day after day. The human soul deserves it. The Cuban soul needs and appreciates it.

May the spirit of festivity accompany us.

It is not easy, but it is worth it!