We rarely stop to think about how fantastic the concept of “living” is, in terms of emotions, thoughts and choices. At least in a day we have the opportunity to be bored and motivated, happy and sad, love and be loved, come and go,
This may seem a little obvious. Logically, today we have access to different means of information that go beyond our ability to encompass everything that is transmitted to us and therefore simply loses its importance. In the meantime, it is essential to manage our time so that you can cover most of these means.
- But what if our only daily choice for thinking.
- Feeling or doing is living?Please note that this is not one of the options mentioned at the beginning.
- But chances are we didn’t even notice.
- Live? Understood how? Go on living?Or? Staying alive is so basic we don’t even notice.
However, in fact, a large part of the world’s population stands up and lies down every day in the face of this dilemma, of continuing to live, or not, for more reasons than a human mind accustomed to well-being can understand. Hunger, poverty, terminal illness and, of course, war.
Take the last example, namely the Syrian civil war, in general, one thing to keep in mind is that in 2016 it has been more than 5 years since the Syrian civilian population began to die indiscriminately, to date more than 250,000 lives have been recorded. Ruined.
While our sensibility is blocked by the myriad of similar news with which we are bombarded daily, in society where these lives are lost they make a monstrous impact at all levels, it would be impossible to sum up in words the magnitude of the situation. changes experienced by the surviving victims of the conflict.
However, all these changes go through the same dilemma: living or not living. Am I going to stay alive tonight?These are logical questions, human and even necessary in the face of a situation in which 512 bombs were thrown irregularly a day on a single people.
Well, against all odds, survivors persist mentally. They don’t lose their minds, they have difficulty staying alive physically and mentally. And besides, survivors find a way to make sense of (if you can) the conflict, be a part of it.
They do so by leaving their homes to engage in immigration, fighting for resistance, with few guarantees, or through social support actions for groups in need (workshops to start companies for women who have never worked, health work in hospitals, information and documentation work, etc. ).
They remain alert, on a lot of nerves, their faces altered by harsh plagues and now the few customs that war has forgotten to destroy, they have a hard time making a living for their families and as I discover and approach this reality. , one question resounds more and more in my head: how is it possible that they succeed?
It is difficult to imagine how a human being is able to survive such situations, we can think of options from which these altruistic behaviors may arise, such as resilience, intense fear or the social feeling of being together in the face of adversity. It could also be explained by the plastic ability of humans to normalize things that cannot be normalized, such as death.
All these options drawn from psychology and many others not mentioned here could be valid to begin to understand how the mind of a person who is in such situations works, but there is something that directly involves them in the situation, such as humans and living beings: the absence of any other option than living.
It may seem insensitive and even hypocritical to say this on our side of the mirror, but it is true, I explain: why do they say they no longer have options?This is really not right, they always have the opportunity to do nothing, and they expect to know if they will live or die at the hands of those who attack them, they can practically do it. It would also make sense under the circumstances.
When we say that they have no choice, we allude that humanly their nature pushes them into survival, by the use of physical and mental resources, by struggle and the search for meaning, this example we have seen without choice in many accounts. of survivors who have recounted their experiences, with authors and psychoanalysts Viktor Frankl, Erich Fromm or Boris Cyrulnik, among others.
And this is something that we definitely share with those of us who live in these situations: human nature, it is this nature that allows us to feel fear, to be resilient, to normalize, to fight or to escape, it is the same that makes our Days so rich in emotions, thoughts and choices, but it is above all that drives us to live.
We can live alienated from the outside world, locked in an information bubble, we can decide not to deal with this conflict, or do everything, yet at the end of the day, we will always have the foolproof resource of our humanity. . Look at the world through the eyes of a human being, feel like a human being and, above all, learn as a human being. Learn, because if we can’t, if there’s no other way out, if everything seems lost, you’ll always have a chance to live.
Text by Eduardo Torrecillas