Talking with Analuz about a feeling of nostalgia that sometimes invades in the afternoon after finishing a day’s work, I remembered that feeling of emptiness or silence that occurred in me when I was still living in Guatemala and leaving the office late. I think maybe it’s something that comes from feeling that change in the rhythm or tempo of the day that occurs when the energies drop at the end of a day, or maybe it’s simply that the sunsets remind us that inevitably one more day is gone, as if time were slipping out of our hands.
Analuz told me that sometimes I even felt a change of smell in the environment and I quickly understood in my mind what she meant because I felt it too.
But the central axis of the conversation was the sensitivity that some people have to perceive these changes more intensely and the effect they generate on us or perhaps it is just a matter of being present and calm to be able to feel them.
This summer I had the opportunity to be in a place in Sardinia called Costa Paradiso, perhaps the most beautiful place I have visited since I started my life in Europe, and I told him that one afternoon we went to see the sunset at a restaurant in front of the sea and just as the sun was setting on the horizon a band began to play live music and inevitably some tears began to come out From my eyes, in the midst of the chaos of my active mind, I had never before been able to observe a sunset so carefully and it was an eye-opening moment for me, a call to live my most present life.
The next day we hiked until we reached the same place we had been the previous afternoon, this time it was empty. We ordered two cappuccinos and two cornets from the pistachio and while I was waiting Radiohead’s High and Dry started playing. Again I was overcome by a mixture of feelings; Admiration and gratitude for being able to live such a special moment, having my favorite combination for breakfast, contemplating wonderful views while listening to a genre of music that I love, feeling the breeze in my body after a long walk under the sun… I would sum it all up as a feast for my senses; a moment that I would have liked to immortalize.
At the same time, a deep nostalgia almost always springs up in me when I realize how far I am from everything I left in Guatemala… the places, the people, those sensations that we talked about with Analuz when we left work, the long rainy afternoons, the sunsets in winter, the smell of summer at the beginning of March when the heat began and in general, that special tropical climate that we have in Guatemala to which if we paid more attention, we would know how to value more the richness it brings to our bodies and minds.
I close with this text that I found a book and it fit perfectly with what I sometimes try to express:
“Maybe it’s because we can’t go back in time but we can return to the scenarios of a love story, a crime, happiness and a fateful decision; Places are what remains, what we can possess, what is immortal. The places that have made us who we are become the tangible landscape of memory, and in a way we also become them. They are what we can possess and what ultimately ends up possessing us.” – A guide to the art of getting lost by Rebecca Solnit.
