Be welcome back home

Would there be something truly positive about the difficult circumstances we are facing?

I tend to believe so.

In the not so remote possibility of always being able to find, if not at the moment, but over time, something good or useful in whatever situation.

Everyone that, like me, has undergone surgery knows the physical and emotional discomfort before, during and after it. Like the unpleasant moment, as my wife always recalls, lying on the stretcher, being led through the corridors towards the operation room, looking at the lights on the ceiling. Argh ...! Just remembering it makes my stomach turn.

But if it's so bad, so uncomfortable, why do we face something like this? Simple. We all know: we are after the restoration of what isn't good or the cure of what is completely bad.

Therefore, there must be something good in what is bad, or seems to be bad only.

And then we got the pandemic, restrictions of mobility, of accessing, of gathering and bam... all of us?(no, not everybody, but many, many of us) are sent to work from home. A simple connection of two simple terms, work and home, work from home.

And so, curiously, we turn 200 years from on the History clock and now, again, father and mother, son and baby, parrot and Alfred (the family’s dachshund), will all be together, re-united, to-gether, co-nnected, every day, every moment of the day, the whole day, the whole month, an entire year. Yay!

Yay?! ... What do you mean? My life is now a living hell. The parrot is barking (yes, it learned from Alfred), the dog meows (no explanation, it’s just a fact), the baby is biting his brother, my wife is crying and... ops, I forgot Junior's online class.

But was that all, my friends?

Maybe, just maybe. After 10 years of marriage (gosh, Junior will be 8 soon, he’s all grown up) only when the office went back to the house, only when you went back to working together (even though in totally different companies) that you are finally living together?

Up until March last year it was about 5 "hi, honey - bye, honey" per week.

You saw each other, almost always blurry, half asleep during breakfast and then you were both on your way. An hour and a half in traffic on the way in, just as much on the way back, and exhaustedly running into each other at the end of the day. Chit-chat. Divided attention to baby, Junior, TV, parrot and Alfred (he’s overweight, we need to take him to the vet on Saturday,... If we can… So much to do this Saturday).

And now?

Now is, hi honey, hi honey, hi honey, hi honey, hi honey... Like an echo. Hiiii honeyy, hiiii honeyy. 6 days, 7 days, 37 days … A full year. Hi, honey.

And, suddenly, everybody started buying new furniture. We discovered the house where we live. We also discovered the others that also live in our house.

The father hears the baby crying, all day, every day. Yes, the cry the mother listens to 700 times a day, every day. The mother started to understand biology to help Junior. The father started to understand biology in order to help mom to help Junior. Junior, who already knew everything about computers, had to learn how to use Zoom to be able to help Dad and Mom to have conference calls.

And suddenly, out of the blue, when the office went back into the house, we started to realize that a home is not just a house. A house is made of bricks, a home is made of love and love is made of relationships. And we only relate when we are close, and yes, this whole Thing is serious, it is deadly, but it brought us together. Back home.

It separated us from our bosses, from the traffic, from the classmates, from the beer buddies, but it brought us together inside the house. And we had, and we are still having, the chance to learn more about the inhabitants of a place called home. And to learn from them who we truly are.

After 200 years since the Industrial Revolution that got parents from their homes and took them out, away, to the factory.

The Thing, brought us back in.

And this has an immense potential to be truly good.