Relativity of Human

“Always looking on the same side, 
the neck stiffens.” (African proverb)

 

Rumpin, Bogor. Indonesia, 17 September 2016

In a conversation with Antonio Moncelsi, a traveler and an Asian lover like me, we talked about a completely different lifestyle among Filipino, Thai or Vietnamese farmers.

He told me, "The world is a spinning ball where we are just a dot. We feel so important with our values, cocky with our Coca-Cola, McDonald's and smells of scooters, with which we contaminate Asia. But they do not care about us, they live just fine and even better without what we call Western values. We just an insignificant points.Everyone has to travel to see another country, not to collect postcards from those places, but to understand this profound and undeniable reality. "

 

Wise words, my friend. I think absolutely  like you. It is true that our consciousness as human beings is formed through our encounter with others, but often we are not at all important to them. They do not care about the western culture that we claimed to be great. Names such as Homer, Plato, Dante, Michelangelo, Pasolini, have no meaning to those who every day planted the rice diligently and regularly for hours.

As a farmer in the middle of rice fields in Indonesia once told me, "I woke up at dawn, went picking cucumbers all day, going home at sunset. I eat, pray, and sleep. Tomorrow is the same. I do not have a television or smartphone. But I do not have to experience stress because of the traffic, like those who live in big cities. And I can still wash the fruits in the river water that flows in front of my house. Which one you prefer?"

The world is a constantly spinning ball where we are a relative dot. There’s or there’s not, it does not matter. This should always be the point of view of people who visit other countries or meet foreigners in their own city. It is never written anywhere that we are better than them.

Rome, 17 September 2017

 

Post scriptum:

This you read was the conclusion of my book “Sweet Light”. A thought of 2017 that I still fully agree with, and I wouldn't change an iota. 

These last three years, made up of many trips and meetings, have confirmed once again what I had written. 

Wherever we go we bring our personal history and culture, but there is no better or higher than another. Meeting a King in Malaysia did not make me feel inferior, just as meeting people who live in the slums of Dhaka did not make me superior.

I myself no longer know what culture or identity I belong to. I no longer know what to answer when they ask me which country I come from, and my language is a sieve of terms from different languages. It's like holding your breath and inhaling: you feel the air rushing in and getting lost in a small point at the bottom of your throat, but then when you release your breath, everything comes out of you and expands out.

I am reminded of a beautiful phrase by Tiziano Terzani, one of the most famous Italian travelers and journalists, who spent his whole life documenting conflicts in every part of the world, especially in Asia. His last book was a long dialogue with his son to whom he gave an account of all that had been his existence, one step away from death, and one of the last sentences was this: “I have been many things, but in the end I have not been anyone.”

I also feel my life having come close to the shore; I see it from afar. I've already started getting ready to say goodbye, and I'm not sad.

It's really true, in the end I am nobody, and this is perhaps the greatest richness, the most important teaching I have had in my life, as Socrates taught at the beginning of human history: “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

 

If I have to choose a moment that stops in time all the meaning of my existence, it is still this: I sat with that farmer in Indonesia, on the veranda of his house, after photographing plantations, buffaloes and streams of water all morning, far from everything and so close to their essence.

Sometimes the most precious teachings are found in the most unexpected appearances and places.

 

Tiziano Terzani: “La fine è il mio inizio” (Longanesi, 2006)

Italian version