What Do You Commit To In Life?

A few weeks ago I was at home with a friend. We had spent the whole night talking and it had gotten to us at dawn almost without realizing it. We talked about our lives, with a certain feeling of strangeness, of unreality, due to the difficult circumstances that the country and most of the people are going through.

He has an active commitment to various causes and I asked him if it was not difficult for him to maintain it in these moments that seem to require focusing and even closing in on his own problems. “The difficult thing,” he answered, “is living as if nothing was of sufficient importance.”

He told me this as we watched the pilgrims who were marching early in the morning go by from a window in the direction of the bridge through which they would cross the Lérez River, following the Portuguese road that connects the neighboring country with Santiago de Compostela.

Commitment produces intimate satisfaction

As always, they were animated. Rare is the day when I don’t come across someone and sometimes they stop me to ask me something, and in all of them I see an intimate satisfaction. I asked my friend if that feeling of achievement and reward that I observe in pilgrims, he feels it too. “Every day,” he replied. This friend participates in the social aid network that has been created in the municipality to serve people who need food, clothes, a washing machine, something. He and others like him have mobilized, with the help of the internet, to meet all the needs they can.

I have another friend in the city who owns a restaurant with his wife on a little-traveled street in the old town, as it is off the beaten track, but with other neighbors he is managing to give it new life: they decorate the balconies with flowers, they hold exhibitions of photos, promote neighborhood actions … The objective is to face the crisis and revitalize the area, obviously, but also to breathe and create moments of joy to those who come to the street.

A friend has spent years working with the NGO Action Against Hunger and with UN aid organizations to alleviate famines in Africa and some American countries. The stamps in his passport are a geography of planetary emergencies: Colombia, Haiti, Cameroon, Mozambique, Ivory Coast, Mali, Ethiopia … He tells little of what he has seen, and less of the dangers he has run, and he would even be uncomfortable If she only knew that I am writing this, but I have never seen her unhappy with life or overcome by it. Critical, very critical, yes, but always firmly tied to reality and its possibilities, to change them.

Other friends, a couple, have inaugurated this summer the house that they have built in a town in Teruel. They began more than twenty years ago, from a dilapidated peasant house inherited by him. With few resources and still living in Barcelona, they have done everything, with wood, stone and glass, learning to do what they did not know and improving the skills they already had. At first they spent their nights in sleeping bags, in a tent planted in a bedroom without a roof, but far from being a source of contention, discomfort and overcoming them united them much more.

What value do we give to life?

I’ve asked everyone the same question at some point: why? And none have been able to answer specifically. Why do some commit and others do not? Why do some put all their will and energy into relationships and others not? Why do some mobilize to change things and others not? I do not think there is a precise answer to these questions, but I think it can make a finding: the commitment is the way we say that something or someone we care about.

It is not an exercise in rhetoric, but a practical one. It is not something abstract, but concrete. It is not something for an indeterminate time, but unlimited. Commitment is a demonstration of the importance we give to life, starting with our own, because only when it is valued do we become decisively involved in it.

Are you paralyzed by fear?

However, I keep reading that more and more people do not want to commit themselves, something that experts attribute to the uncertainty that it has installed in our lives, to the diffuse fear that has been sown in our society and that paralyzes it. It conditions everything. Sociologists and psychologists say that the formalization of the relationship takes as long as possible, as well as the decision to have children or the moment for it; even social involvement decreases. We are heading towards a society characterized, as they say, by individualism and insecurity, a “for himself who can”, as if only in the fierce individual conflict there were possibilities of survival or improvement.

If they had told us a few years ago that we would see each other like this, many of us would have answered that it was impossible: the well-being achieved seemed like a definite achievement. We believed we were safe from the vicissitudes of life and history and we settled on the comfort we achieved. But that strength was not such, as we have seen. In fact, if each one looks within, he will see that the lack of commitment that characterizes our society does not come from now. The years of economic prosperity fostered a culture of immediate satisfaction that is the opposite of commitment.

Relationships became more superficial and were experienced as a limiting coercion, because it forced us to renounce other plans, other possibilities. As peterpans, we delayed assuming responsibilities as long as we could with the presumption that we shouldn’t tie ourselves to anything. The world, life, were full of possibilities and you had to keep yourself free to have them within reach. And around us we saw the multiplying of adults who dressed and spoke like adolescents, adolescents who prolonged childhood as long as they could, and elderly people who did everything possible to look like youngsters.

Let’s find something to lean on

The situation has changed and today the securities in which we lived have disappeared, as if they were mirages. Unemployment or fear of losing a job, uncertainty and lack of resources have triggered the number of people who come to specialized consultations with symptoms such as dejection, sadness, frustration or anguish, if not depression. Couples in rupture remain because it is unfeasible to face the separation and the emancipated young people return home because they cannot maintain their independent life. Everything is changing and it is changing very fast, and we need to find something to lean on.

Where will we find the strength we need? The answer cannot be other than in ourselves, in ourselves and in those around us, as the friends of whom I spoke at the beginning show me every day. We must anchor ourselves to the ground, put our feet on the ground and feel life again as a commitment that grows within us and branches out to others to stop wondering what is going to happen and ask ourselves what we can do.

It is not easy, because it requires, now and always, to take responsibility for what we do, although we do not know for sure where it will lead us, because not everything is in our hands and we cannot avoid all suffering or disappointment. We can make a mistake when committing ourselves to someone, to a cause, to a people, or unsuspected consequences of our decision may appear in the future, but precisely that is the greatest quality of commitment, which gives it all its significance, meaning and importance: We take a risk because we know that that being or that thing that we embrace has enormous value for itself and for us, and deserves our decision. We expose ourselves, certainly, but is living without compromise free from fear and disappointment?

Don’t go around, choose a path

The particular life of each one is inserted in a complex game of causal relationships that is impossible to control, but by committing ourselves we take steps in one direction and fill our days, one after another, with meaning. We leave behind the circular life, turning around and problems without any orientation, and we move towards a future, towards a form of fulfillment, of personal completeness.

Nothing guarantees that we will be successful: the woman or man with whom we have decided to unite with all the consequences of a love given, the action we have decided to undertake or the social cause in which we strive, can bear unsuspected results, but Each step and each day that we have taken will be worth it, and each present moment will be inserted in a chain of unique moments that will allow us to squeeze our possibilities and enjoy them.

Committing – this is what some people teach me every day and what I have learned in the many years that I have lived – means trusting in ourselves, that we will be able to face life no matter what happens, no matter how much circumstances change. . Commitment implies discovering and appreciating the good in each relationship and daring to delve into each one of them, and it means enjoying the present without ceasing to think about the future and without fearing it. To commit is to undertake a path, like those pilgrims that I see passing from my house: one day they started walking with a goal, a sense that guided their steps and freed them to enjoy each day, each chapter that they have completed and that nothing now nor will anyone be able to take them away.