When it really happens: SHTF...

[Ovidio]

So so..., after seven months, today we met our friends from the winter holidays.
We were together during the carnival week at the end of February, just before the lockdown.
We have three kids, one boy with 17 years, and two girls with 14 and 10. They have three girls with 16, 13 and 6 years.
We meet in the mountains since 2008 and are very good, if distanced!, friends.
The kids really enjoy each others company.
This family is from Trieste, less than 100 km from here, but during the past months we never found a moment to meet.
Today was the day.
The kids grew up a lot, all of them. They just fell into each others arms as soon as they met.
We did the same with the parents.
It was a great moment of a wonderful day.
We’ll keep meeting in the mountains for our week of skying, as we did in the past 8 years.

Lately I started analyzing this pandemonium...
I hate to feel being manoeuvered, manipulated, forced to accept things and situations I don’t like.
But, if I look at all of this from another angle, a very private and intimate one, I must admit that this pandemics has changed my life for best.
I know I’m priviledged. I work with the food and pharma industry, so this situation has not damaged me in any way, maybe it could almost be considered neutral.
But it kept me home. Reduced my travel time by 80-90%.
I have been with my wife from before my military duty. Actually, from 1992.
Apart from the first 18 months before military, until July 1994, I have never been home for more than 10-15 days in a row.
Now I have traveled for less than 20 days in 7 months.
If I had to take a bet, I would have bet that I would drive crazy after two weeks.
In fact, I have never enjoyed myself, my family...life! as much as I did since the start of this foolish thing.
Today, meeting this family, people we meet each and every year, but only on the sky tracks, I again got this feeling of... I can’t explain.
I was so happy, so thoroughly, deeply, strongly alive...glad to meet good people...
This pandemic is crap, but it made me change my life. It brought me back to the real values.
I’m scared to write it down in clear, plain words, but it made me a better person.
Sincerely...I don’t want to go back to “normal” life.
I want to keep traveling at a lower pace, making skype or teams meetings for all those “trivial” reasons for which I wasted so much time, family time, before.
I said that earlier! I’m priviledged right now, working for the food and pharma industy, but I feel like it was time to somehow slow down and start focusing again on the real values...my kids, my wonderful, loving, unbelievably great and savvy wife.
I love life as I never did before.
Just felt I had to tell it to someone...
Keep looking ahead my friends!