Even after bringing to mind one of those episodes that made you laugh until you cried: you lived it again, clear, almost real. Your tired eyes lit up for a few seconds… They were the episodes like flashes of your 80 years reviewed by you on that Saturday morning.
The day progressed and your children began to arrive, along with them your grandchildren, great-grandchildren, other family members and a few friends who were still alive.
It was your birthday, they celebrated your life and you celebrated the lives of those who had accompanied you.
There were many hugs, the loving words multiplied and your heart was happy to receive so much affection in a single afternoon. There was laughter; there were stories of common stories; There were even tears when remembering more than one who was no longer here. An invisible bond touched them and intertwined them. The Dirac Equation materialized in front of you.
In the midst of the celebration and as if this were your last opportunity, you felt the impulse to teach them what you had learned more than 3 decades ago. A concern had been following you for some time. You had observed that several of your children and some grandchildren moved forward, paying their attention to what did not last, neglecting their affections, their friendships and even their most precious ties. You recognized in them and their challenges what you had also experienced decades before. So, you wanted to save them sadness. You wanted to save them drama.
But you remembered that, like you, they had to walk their own path, fall, get lost, to perhaps reach this same conclusion or another…
You had learned the importance of relationships. Sometimes with tears and other times with laughter you had recorded the vitality of another’s company. The words of your friend, the psychologist and writer Alejandro de Barbieri, resonated with you:
“We live in vertigo and from vertigo. We are always moving towards the next dizzying change that will come. What is relevant about this is that this “dizzying way” of living conspires against the time necessary to build bonds, that is, to create a meeting.”
His words had become yours and your life motto was repeated in your head, to the rhythm of a prayer:
“We only take this plane:
What we learn.
What we bequeath to others.
And the bonds we cultivate.”
While you were thinking about all this, your daughter brought the cake with the candles lit. On the count of three and when you were going to blow your 80, you felt a light over your eyes, it was beginning to dawn and you woke up from what had been just a dream.
You sighed.
You were relieved to think that at 30 years younger you could still make some adjustments to the way you were living. You went for your coffee and whispered:
“It is still time to live.”